Dennis Hollingsworth

See I See #2

See I See #1

Last Week I Did A Thing

From my Notes: Art Definition

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"Abstraction is the hallmark of ideology."
- Philip Pilkington

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"music [the visual arts included] is a fugazi."
-Mike Benz T=55:00

(Context: regime overthrow spy games in Venezuela and beyond)

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"People don't have ideas, ideas have people."
-Rupert Sheldrake

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Lately, I've been thinking about our art world, this current one, as a Real art world hidden or engulfed or engorged by an ever inflating corona of a false art world.

Problems with cynicism and self delusion. Reality check: how much of this thought process is real or subjective?

What is it about art that is real and false?

Is Art the Tao (Dao)?

Is art a Platonic form?

"It is better to not try to be virtuous or pretty or knowledgeable because it is those people who get used or ultimately confused. It is not through virtuousness or trying to be virtuous that true virtuousness is achieved. It is through uselessness that one truly becomes useful." -Zhuangzi

"He uses language to go beyond language, in the end."

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something in here, pertains to art
"...very specific engineering limitations..."
The mistake: Designing to what we think is possible at the ultimate limit (idealized limits), at the ultimate time.

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There's an essential conflict about whether the world is corporate or disincorporated (past tense, intentional).

A resentful attitude about technology and innovation says no.

Mankind in modernity is homeless. However, a foundational story in the West is The Odyssey (similar to the Messiah?), a story that aches for home. This means that the Industrial Revolution isn't the cause of our unease and disquiet is built in. The reassuringly integrative story of Classicism is really a story about class.

However much the pre-modern integration and societal harmony was either mythical or concrete or merely functional, this societal framework did exist and it did permeate the world at one time.

History is, at the end of the day, a story. The story of art, of fifty years ago or earlier had been questioned and criticized as being patriarchal or too rigid otherwise. What alternative stories of art had been advanced in this long meantime?

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Inspiration, inkling, the muse,

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Snip of one of my comments to Saul Ostrow's "Note to Self: Abstract Art's Form and Function"

The definition of art derives from the root meaning: arə- Proto-Indo-European and Greek ar- "to fit together." Fabrication lies at the heart of the meaning, but within lies a crucial aspect that exceeds mere assembly. Popular usage indicates a scope that is transcendental, indicative of the superlative. The art of war, the art of cooking, the art of reasoning, the art of...

What I take from this is something about the moment when one is operating at and beyond the frontier of all extant known methods of "fabrication" (bracketed to indicate an expansive definition of the term).

This is the territory where one resorts to inspiration, imagination, what was known to be the muse, the world shared with faith, the land (noumena?) into which our rational mind pushes into, balls cupped into the hands*.

The mushiness of the definition of art , lying as it does between a categorical and qualitative indicator.

Art may even belong solely to the West, it is singular, an issue of individuals, autonomous, superlative. In the non-West, it might be inextricably bound within communitarian relationships.

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People can't define art, so how can anyone define success in art?

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Art with a capital A, outsider art, established artists, neophyte, white cube galleries, historic spaces, art of the Now...

Gil Sanchez anecdote: "I too am in history"

What hovers in this conversation is the distinction between what is in or out of art. We've been erasing distinctions for decades now. What remains however, is the tacit acceptance that "art with a capital "A" is that which is enmeshed in the gears of capital. Art that is an asset class is unconsciously the legacy description of "successful " art.

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It's difficult for the general public to distinguish between art and denatured art.

Art has become good enough

Intimidation & perceived elitism

Blindness

Even among those educated in the arts

Even those in the ranks of the "elite"

When the elite themselves have given up

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T=11:30
Corporeality allows us to have imagination, to grow and expand. Heaven (non-corporeality) is perfect and by definition, static.

Later in the video, other models (Hinduism & Dante) reflect Leibniz's Monadology.
(T=16:00) Pearls and mirrors are analogs of monads.

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Corporatist state of mind...

"Corporations versus the constitution "

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CARTER RATCLIFF
AUG 13
[Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656. The Prado, Madrid]

Is Art Good for You?

Of course it is, but why? Last month Artsy addressed that question in an essay entitled "4 Reasons Why Looking at Art Is Good for You." Here they are, in the order they were presented:

Art can help your mental health
Art can improve social skills and resilience
Engaging with art can help your heart
Being around art can lift your mood

The first, second, and fourth reasons overlap, but never mind. Rushing past its minor muddle, the essay goes straight for scientific testimony, which corroborates much that art-lovers have long suspected:

"A growing body of research ... shows that even a single session of viewing visual art can significantly enhance wellbeing, reduce stress, and activate pleasure and reward pathways in the brain," said Dr. Nisha Sajnani, director of arts and health at New York University and co-director of Jameel Arts & Health Lab. "These effects are amplified by moments of reflection, social connection, and personal meaning--reminding us that art doesn't just reflect life--it helps us feel more alive."

How does art have these desirable effects? Well, the emotions prompted by art have been linked with lower levels of cytokines, proteins that control inflammation. Art supports our immune systems. But note this: researchers have shown that "nature and spirituality" can affect us in similar ways. Art prompts the release of dopamine. "the 'feel-good' neurotransmitter," and that's nice, though art has no monopoly over this physiological process. We also get dopamine hits from scrolling through our phones, which inspires an unhappy thought: spending half an hour with meaningless Facebook posts is equal, neurologically speaking, to half an hour face to face with Las Meninas. This equivalence would not, I suppose, be highlighted by even the most obsessively data-driven scientist--certainly not by Professor Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at University College London, who discovered that "the way our brain reacts to beautiful artworks is very similar to how it responds when we are in love." Professor Zeki has not, as far as I know, investigated the conflict that arises when the one you love does not love the art that you do.

Being in love, loving art, feeling a rush of spirituality, wandering through nature, wasting time on a cell phone--these are a few of the activities and states of being that can turn the tide of neurotransmitters in a positive direction. Not all are good and some are very bad. Have neurobiologists investigated the possibility that psychopaths get a dopamine high from attacking people? Book Sixteen of The Iliad features Achilles enraged and extoling the anger that "rises up in the soul of a man like smoke, and the taste thereof is sweeter than drops of honey." (Samuel Butler's translation.) I am not saying that Achilles was a psychopath. Still, in providing a classic example of pleasure felt for dubious reasons, his wrath points to an obvious truth: brain chemistry is amoral. And it lacks taste. The silliest cartoon can stimulate as much dopamine as the greatest painting.

Why bring taste into it? Am I a snob? Maybe, but what I take for my good taste is not militant. I like certain cartoons and dumb jokes and idiotic pop songs and all manner of things that thrive on a plateau far below the one where I find the art I admire. What, then, is the problem? There isn't one unless we impose on culture the ideal of equality that should guide our political life. Everyone should be equal before the law. Everyone should be free to vote and to say whatever. Thus, anyone has the right to recommend that I take professional wrestling as seriously as I take art. Yet I am under no obligation to agree, even if a scientific study finds that art and professional wrestling produce comparably positive neurological effects in their respective devotees. My right to my own opinion is obvious. Just as obviously, brain chemistry is a physical not a cultural phenomenon.

It is good to feel good, and it is reassuring to hear that art can help us improve our moods. Yet science provides no way to scope out the larger picture. Art contributes not only to individual well-being but also to the play of meaning and value that sustains our communal lives--and without which there is no individuality. It is said that we are social animals. We are, as well, animals who become who we are in a give and take with our culture as well as our society, and I believe that the more complex and demanding the artworks with which we engage the better we will be. I have no lab results to back up this belief. Nor do I feel the need for them. Call me a snob, but it seems to me indubitable that it is better for you and the culture if you get involved with the grand subtleties of Las Meninas and avoid the brutish melodrama of professional wrestling, the crude mythology of movies spun off from Marvel comics, and the addictive emptiness of video games. In Las Meninas you find inexhaustible possibilities for making sense of yourself, others, and the world we inhabit. In the cheesy stuff you find lines of least resistance that lead directly to an abraded and diminished sensibility.

An afterword. What about attractive but merely decorative paintings, competent but overly genteel poems, highly wrought but unambitious novels--all the stuff that is respectably professional and not, after all, so bad? In The Scarlet Pimpernel, a 1934 movie with Leslie Howard, the foppish hero says, "There is nothing quite so bad as something that is not so bad." Clement Greenberg, not a writer I usually invoke with approval, said in an essay on kitsch that upper middlebrow culture is more damaging than low culture. Yet Ludwig Wittgenstein, feeling frustrated by the impossibility of making himself entirely clear to his students, would wallow in Hollywood movies. Jacques Derrida is rumored to have indulged in the worst that French television had to offer. So there may be a place for mediocrity, the best and even the worst of it. More on this later.

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Art vs Art World

Termed "vs" versus because each are distinct, because the latter is t a singularity but instead a multiplicity, because there is commercial aspect that is all too willing to eclipse all others, especially the one whose heart is centered within vision and the imagination.

Many artists these days unfortunately tend to think that the art world is a kind of lock for a key must be fashioned... and people like this (which abound in government, industry and institutions) think of themselves as a key to be shaped, mind, imagination and works.

This is unfortunate because as this kind of artist begins to file away at the teeth of their character

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Without intellectual and creative integrity, art world is just a pyramid scheme.

Late in the history of art, intellectual integrity was strained by the misuse of caprice

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Cognitive Light Cone:
[Michael Levin]

"Every agent can be demarcated, be define defined by the size of the goal they pursue."

Goals are a signal of intelligence.
Agent: Boundary between self and world.
Nested agency.
Agents operate in their own self interest.

Single cells: metabolic goals

Cells comprising muscle and bone (salamanders, for example): goals in anatomical space

Life is the embodiment of intelligence. William James: Intelligence is the ability to reach the same goal by different means.

What is called Platonic Space is the space of minds. "Selflets" populate Platonic space.

You don't have access to your past. You have access to your memory engrams, which the future you will have to interpret, treating your own memories as messages from your past self. Therefore those memories will have to be interpreted. You are not committed to the fidelity of that information, you are committed to the salience of that information. A process view of the self. Continuous storytelling. Our current actions are messages to our future self.

The persistent self is breaking down.

Q: Larger light cone = better? A: depends on the organism. Enlarging the light cone enlarges meaning.

CSAS: Center for the Study of Apparent Selves.

Fundamental unit in the world: perspective.

Laplacian Demons are unsustainable. You can't afford to track everything. As your past self compresses many diverse experiences into a compact representation, a memory trace of what happened... [pithiness] the thing about compression is that data that's compressed most efficiently starts to look random. Lots of metadata loss. Unless you know the algorithm required [an unconscious process*] to decompress [the engram], the data itself looks like noise, because you've pulled out the correlations. You have to be creative to interpret your own engrams [memories]. There are no non-destructive recall of memories.

* These unconscious processes [referred to "hardware"] doesn't define you, it enables or constrains what you want to do. We are a collective intelligence or groups of cells. The unconscious dimension is unconscious for a good reason. (Reference to film Ex Machina, an unfortunate interpretation, the materialism of humans being the mere resultant of the cogs and gears aka proteins, lipids and ions.). Humans are resultant beings. No discovery of the fundamental reality of your being should pull you away from the emergence of who you are. Materialism underestimates matter.. We are majestic agentic beings. Really minimal things have surprising cognitive qualities. [Leibniz]

Bio-electricity as cognitive glue, allowing scalability.

(T = 50:00) Intelligence: a specific type of problem solving. "Beginner's mind". A new definition of intelligence. Basis for experimentation: what is the problem space, what are the goals and what are the capabilities it has to reach those goals? A measurement of competency.

Paper: "Reframing Cognition". Basel cognition: stories of scaling, a question of where did our cognitive abilities come from? Not panpsychism. Potential energy and least action principles are the tiniest hopes and dreams that there are, the most basel version of cognition. Experimentation involves a selection of tools to address the problem.

(T=+1:00:00) What does a good theory of consciousness give you? Consciousness is the kind of thing that cannot be studied in the third person, you can only study it by being part of the experiment. A weak version of this is art. Stronger form: a rich brain interface, you have to fuse with the subject of the experiment. Other subsystems of the body have a non zero amount of consciousness. We are a collection of interacting consciousnesses.

Bioelectricity, xenobots, anthrobots...

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Input vs output side of consciousnesses

The action side, the ability to do things

Agent: "What do I do next?"

Driven by the need to choose the next action.

New definition of consciousnesses: Kevin _____ "I move, therefore I am."

Panpsychism with an empirical component (intentional?)

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Art in terms of Human Action:

"Economics is the study of human action with regard for improving life when scarcity is involved."
-Dave Smith

T=7:30
(Libertarian comic Dave Smith, while discussing the impact of 2025 tariffs in Austrian Economic terms.)

Human Action

Praxeology
Not to be confused with Practice theory, which is also called praxeology.
In philosophy, praxeology or praxiology(/ˌpræksiˈɒlədʒi/; from Ancient Greek πρᾶξις(praxis) 'deed, action' and -λογία (-logia) 'study of') is the theory of human action, based on the notion that humans engage in purposeful behavior, contrary to reflexive behavior and other unintentional behavior.

In Smith's definition, with regards of the artworld, the aspects of improving life, aka flourishing, and scarcity stand out. An artists central objective is to improve life, even when, or perhaps especially when employing ironic means to do so. Scarcity is central when quality inevitably ranks and sorts the various abundance of accumulated art produced or conjured in the world at any given time.

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Lee Krasner 1978 Interview
(Earlier), she describes the transition from the academic to the cubism as taught by Hoffman was as difficult as the transition from that to the abstraction (all over) of Pollock. It took her three years painting, as she described it, "frozen grey masses" to get to the other side of cubism, which was always object or subject based.

Later, she relates the first encounter of Hoffman and Pollock, where Hoffman chides Pollock for not dealing with nature (as subject), when Pollock famously retorted "I am nature."

T=15:00
"...if we think of the Renaissance concept of space where you are the artist up here and whatever it is ...your using perspective as your means and you are making your whatever you're doing with it. Now if we go from that concept into cubism, the thing is still there in the same sense [that] nature is there. I am here the artist, I observe and the only thing is frontal now and that much has taken place. Now, in Pollock once more, there is another transition. I can't define it for you. Sorry, it's not my job."

Cubism & academicism: artist > nature (as subject)

AbEx abstraction: artist > artist (the self, subjective experience, therefore the psychological preoccupation with Freud & Jung)

Pop: artist > consumer culture

Minimalism: artist > (specific) object (analytic, reductive)

Conceptualism: artist > algorithm (mental will)

Post 20th century art: artist > the physical reality of a work of art / the world at large (cumulative experience)

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algorithm
/ăl′gə-rĭᴛʜ″əm/

noun
A finite set of unambiguous instructions that, given some set of initial conditions, can be performed in a prescribed sequence to achieve a certain goal and that has a recognizable set of end conditions.

A precise rule (or set of rules) specifying how to solve some problem; a set of procedures guaranteed to find the solution to a problem. 

A precise step-by-step plan for a computational procedure that possibly begins with an input value and yields an output value in a finite number of steps.

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Ockham's Razor
Elegance
Beauty?
Piercing through the muddle.

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I awoke to the thought of how art is different altogether from an art market or an art industry ... or maybe even from an art world. These words coalesced and lingered in my mind, kept me awake as I turned them over and over.

"...hypothesize the hypostatic..."

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Sun Tzu Art of War
There are three great avenues of opportunities in life: Events, Trends, and conditions.

Hypostasis

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Skin in the game > retouch the material touchstone.

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Avant-Garde
If once the most advanced was the margin, now the margin is considered the most advanced. (This dates to the 1950's. What of this 70 years later?)

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Constraints built into reality.
vs
Imagination unconstrained.

Once we began to model reality, eventually some of us tried to make reality fit our models. To refine this assertion: people now tend to use models, virtual constructs propositioning reality, in order to shape the behavior of a target population towards a desired end. Theoretical constructs used as bait.

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Is art simply, self expression (per Spengler)?

Is this still bound to individualism?

Isn't the definition of art in the West inevitably bound to individualism?

Spengler's Prime Symbols

Classical conception:

Concern for the tangible and immediately present: the human body

No horizon

Red & yellow : flesh

Classical gods had limits

Finitude

Ahistorical

Desire for limitations & boundaries

Western culture (Faustian)

Limitless will to power

Reach to the infinite

Ethereal

Blues & greens, the color of death

Brown is a mileu

Calculus: Functions instead of concrete numbers

Cities vs the nation-state

Arabian: enclosed dome

Egyptian: narrow path

Chinese: the wandering path

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Making it strange
Liminal boundary between disruptive innovation and adaptation/acculturation.

Why linger?

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Frontiers of fabrication

Necessity is the mother of invention

Here's my definition in two aspects:

Art is imagination, concretized.

The definition of art derives from the root meaning: arə- Proto-Indo-European and Greek ar- "to fit together." Fabrication lies at the heart of the meaning, but within lies a crucial aspect that exceeds mere assembly.

Popular usage indicates a scope that is transcendental, indicative of the superlative. The art of war, the art of cooking, the art of reasoning, the art of... What I take from this is something about the moment when one is operating at and beyond the frontier of all extant known methods of "fabrication" (bracketed to indicate an expansive definition of the term).

This is the territory where one resorts to inspiration, imagination, what was known to be the muse, the world shared with faith, the land (noumena?) into which our rational mind pushes.

Silos Everywhere You Turn

This week, I launched a project that I have entitled "See I See". I will elaborate further about this endeavor in a future blogpost, right now I want to talk about how proliferating projects like this across other online platforms such as Substack, has me fine tuning the mission of this particular weblog, a project that has been in the running now for 23 years and counting.

Early on, it was a genuine diary, a log online memorializing the great and small in my everyday life. Most times it was about the work progressing in the studio, other times -especially when my wife Stephanie first lived in Spain for an initial extended time, making our house and studio there a home- I was sharing with this audience what life was like in Northern Spain, Catalan Spain. Afterwards, when we returned to Los Angeles, I uploaded snippets of life in the then nascent art community in Chinatown, LA. When we moved to New York City in 2012, the day to day reportage started to dwindle and I started to take notes at the events where thinkers would debate the state of play in the art world at the time.

This blog will certainly maintain its' diaristic function, but the recent adventure in self publishing via the Substack platform will have its effect on the ongoing function of this weblog. See I See will be about the art I see and the thoughts not only I have about it, but ultimately the objective is to capture the dynamic, fleeting, rich dialogue that I have enjoyed with my friends along the way. Until I get to that place where I can attract my fellow artists, curators, writers and friends to clamp a microphone on their lapels and tolerate the camera's gaze... I'll have to go solo. That's no problem, I will enjoy the learning curve even though there's lots of bumps and bruises along the way (to my ego!).

And here I am getting to the thought that started me typing this post in the first place: porting out thematic sectors to other avenues such as art reviews in Substack, and grumbling about the folly of the West in creating the war in Ukraine exclusively in X (formerly know as Twitter), using Instagram as a community bulletin / billboard... and well, that's about it, my little online panorama... I'm going to use this weblog to port portions of my Notes application more often than not. My Notes is the place where I can capture fleeting thoughts when I first arise from bed, those shower thoughts, musings that tend to float while I'm commuting to my studio. This means that sometimes these blogposts might appear more fragmented, maybe aphoristic if I'm lucky, but overall, I'm going to siphon the thoughts that I have been filling into bladders in my Notes, into this weblog. For an example of what I'm talking about, check out the next post.

Ahora

James Bishop / Timothy Taylor Gallery

Last night, convened a talk about the life and work of James Bishop at Timothy Taylor Gallery in TriBeCa. The room was packed with an audience full of what most would call the best painters and writers in NYC. Bishop, a painter straddling France and the USA, painting during what was considered the demise of painting, absorbing the dialog of Minimalism and Primary Structures and painting anyway. It was very interesting to hear the commentary from luminaries such as Molly Warnock, Amy Sillman and David Reed.

I took notes.

Hal Foster and Blake Rayne at Miguel Abreu

Last Saturday, I attended a conversation between Hal Foster and Blake Rayne at Miguel Abreu Gallery in the Lower East Side. The exhibition titled Reserves" comprised of paintings, sculptures and installation of course was fodder for the conversation, but much of it focused on Rayne's paintings. You can find images in the link. Rayne's practice involves a highly articulated breakdown of his painting process, much of which is couched in art theory that ripened, or over-ripened in the early aughts. Again, follow the link to the press release which is descriptive.

It seemed to me that the artist was such a student of thinkers like the very famous Hal Foster, that there wasn't much room for Foster to weigh into the dialogue. At one perhaps pivotal moment, Foster remarked "For a minute there, you sound like a really smart Modernist... and that's MY job!" My notes in red and green denoting Foster and Rayne respectively, show the ratio clearly.

I took notes, although they don't probably capture the drama of the evening. The talk was recorded, and perhaps the gallery might make it available to the public someday, someway.

Ahora

Building Models: The Shape of Painting

Last night, I attended a panel discussion centered on the exhibition at The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation in the Lower East Side, entitled "Building Models: The Shape of Painting", Curated by Saul Ostrow.

Saul is an old friend of mine, as are more than a few artists exhibited in the exhibition. A brilliant feat of curation, I believe Saul had cast an intelligent net over what could be an unwieldy topic, how the physical nature of the support had been incorporated into painting, proper. I consider his essay to be magisterial and I will paste it under the fold.

I took notes:

Continue reading "Building Models: The Shape of Painting"

Ahora

Ahora (and Previously)

...and previously:

(November 10, 2025)

...and previously:

(April 17, 2025)

...and previously:

(April 3, 2025)

What we are looking at are the brace of panel paintings built through the months of cancer treatment, primed and painted in successive color coats initiated during the radiation procedure until completion... this week.(Two white panels coming late to the finish line, yes.) Now begins the paintings, proper. Lots of prep to fulfill the vision proved out (previously, yes) in the three exploratory panels here, here and here.

Tom McGlynn

Yesterday, Tom McGlynn was interviewed by Adam Simon on the occasion of his exhibition titled "This Here", at Rick Wester Fine Art in Chelsea, NYC. The space was crowded with some of the best active painters in the city. Great conversation. I came away with an enhanced appreciation for MyGlynn and Rick Wester as well.

I took notes.

Out of the Woods

Heather Bause Rubenstein recently gave a talk at Ruttowski 68 Gallery in TriBeCa. Her interlocutor was her husband, critic Raphael Rubenstein.

I took notes:

trepidation and commitment

trepidation and commitment
2024
PTG 654
22-1/2" x 28-1/2" x 1-1/2"
Oil on canvas over Wood Panel and Frame

Continue reading "trepidation and commitment"

world shared with faith

world shared with faith
PTG 653
22-1/2" x 28-1/2" x 1-1/2"
Oil on canvas over Wood Panel and Frame

Continue reading "world shared with faith"

the heart of the meaning

the heart of the meaning
2025
PTG 652
22-1/2" x 28-1/2" x 1-1/2"
Oil on canvas over Wood Panel and Frame

Continue reading "the heart of the meaning"

Doors of possibilities

Doors of possibilities
2024
PTG 651
Oil on Canvas over Wire, Wood

Continue reading "Doors of possibilities"

Abiding

Abiding
2024
PTG 650
Approximately 46" diameter, 9" depth
Oil on Canvas over Wire, Wood

Continue reading "Abiding"

Iliad

Iliad
2023
PTG 649
24 works on paper, 36 x 28.5 cm each
Oil on Paper

I'm assigning all 24 works on paper as one work as a whole.
See here and all 24 blogposts during October 25, 2023.

Continue reading "Iliad"

Fin de Año

Fin de Año
PTG 648
60" x 48"
Oil on Canvas over Wood Panel

Continue reading "Fin de Año"

envisioning what had come to pass

envisioning what had come to pass
2023
200 x 40 cm (variable)
Oil on cardboard, string

Continue reading "envisioning what had come to pass"

The Remove

The Remove
2024
PTG 646
28.5" x 30" x 8.25"
Oil on Canvas over Wire and Wood

Continue reading "The Remove"

Bloom

Bloom
2024
PTG 645
28" diameter x 8-1/2" depth

Continue reading "Bloom"

flashes of an optic

flashes of an optic
2024
PTG 644
12" x 14" x 7.75"
Oil on Canvas over Wire and Wood

Continue reading "flashes of an optic"

as noumenal as

as noumenal as
2024
PTG 643
13" x 14" x 4"
Oil on Canvas over Wire and Wood

Continue reading "as noumenal as"

Bad criticism

I went to Triple Canopy's "Bad Criticism" symposium. Triple Canopy, an international online magazine that addresses a specific set of concerns in the contemporary dialog, I thought it would be interesting to to hear what the younger generation had to say about the state of criticism via their social justice perspective. It was interesting.

I took notes...

Downtown Dealers Association

I don't know what I was thinking...

Join us for Downtown Dealers, featuring Jane Lombard and Lisa Carlson, moderated by Matthew Higgs.

Independent is pleased to invite you to Downtown Dealers, a live conversation series uniting New York art dealers across generations to share their approaches and experiences. In celebration of Jane Lombard's 30-year career as a dealer, this panel will feature Jane Lombard and Senior Director Lisa Carlson, in dialogue with Matthew Higgs.

That's not true. I thought that this event might feature seasoned art dealers, talking about the current condition of the art market and of the various responses to go forward. Guess I should have read the event details.

In any event... it was interesting to learn more about Jane Lombard and her gallery history.

I took notes:

Shape of Painting

Back in NYC, my first stop was to see Saul Ostrow's curated group show at The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation located at 87 Eldridge Street in the LES (Lower East Side), NYC.

Building Models: The Shape of Painting

An incisive, extremely well thought out exhibition, The Shape of Painting offers an excellent survey of how painting has extended the realm of plasticity to the historically most overlooked aspect of the medium, the nature of the support. Saul Ostrow, a legendary curator / critic / nearly a philosopher, wrote an immensely thoughtful essay that accompanies a richly succinct overview of the subject, organizing an otherwise unwieldy topic. (The fact that I'm a friend presses no weight on this scale of his esteem. He's that good.) This essay is available in the exhibition catalog, which is now available from The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation.

If you haven't already, please click on the Resnick/Passlof's Foundation exhibition web page to read the press release, an object example of how such a thing should be done... and if you're living in the Tri-State area, get down there and see the show.

A. Must. See.

August + September, 2025

Sovereignty

These three videos tell a story.
Best to be elliptical, for the moment at least.

WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY ART FOR TODAY?

At the end of last July, shortly before I departed NYC for Spain, there was a book release event at Artists Space in TriBeCa. The publication, "WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY ART FOR TODAY? And what should it be for, if anything?" is a coda to a series of conversations dubbed "The Seaport Talks" hosted by the Perić Collection and edited by Dean Kissick. With the pre-departure preparation in full swing, I had just enough time to run down and pick up a copy of the book.

Dean Kissick stirred up a hornet's nest of a debate amongst at least one circle of my friends in NYC with the publication of his article in Harper's December 2024 issue, The Painted Protest. Best to read the whole thing if you haven't already but perhaps one snip might capture the gist: "...the art world had grown frivolous and decadent, that the proliferation of forms and approaches over the decades had reached its limit." Actually, this sentence is followed by touching a third rail, fingering social justice discourses as one of the prime culprits. So, an uproar ensued as friends shared links to response articles some of which you can read here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

As the spring sprung in 2025, I sensed that my pals were weary of the topic, the chatter petered out. My perspective: this whole discussion was late in coming and it was a shame that it had arrived in the wake of the Trump election last November. Social Justice is uniquely armored against critique but it is a fact that art criticism had been dying for decades, long before Social Justice fully entered the stage. Critics are the honey bees of the art world and the collapse of the pollinating function that refines thought and defines breaking art history was a disaster that few could stomach to face. We all whistled past the graveyard of the current art cultural system.

People inexhaustibly nominate a multitude of art movements but in the big picture, there are only two: Modernism and Postmodernism. All too many think that the latter succeeded the other but I think differently. Both were born at the same moment like the particle / antiparticles we think of in physics. I am asserting here that the widespread assumption that art succeeds itself episodically has led us into a mental cul-de-sac, paralyzing our imagination. The inability to appreciate or simply understand that each implicates the other, the Modern and Postmodern, has led our art world of today into a strange and strongly insistent impotence. Similar to the material reality of painting where paint itself relies on both binder and solvent, Modernity can't be properly appreciated or understood until we appreciate how the binder of Modernism critically needs the solvent of Postmodernism and visa versa. We won't be mentally released from the 20th century in order to live into the 21st until we grasp this interrelationship. Until then, we will be mired in confusion and lassitude.

Interlude: my POV.

After the collapse of the Classical canon, the Modernists sought to redraft a canon appropriate to the new age that could be classified anew, whereas Postmodernists despised canon altogether. "We don't need your stinking badges." The seminal figure for the latter group was Marcel Duchamp (in my argument for twin birth, artists like Alfred Jarry had prefigured Duchamp) and his prime influence was the assertion that art is idea. As New York driven Abstract Expressionism started to wane in power and influence, what would become Postmodernism flowered, fueled by the anarchic vapors that inspired Duchamp, all too ready to kill what many considered the father. Here's my nut for encapsulating the bigger picture:

While Modernists wanted to touch God via material means, the Postmodernists instead wanted to point to (not touch) everyday life (not God) via conceptual (not material) means.

Art-as-idea was the core and Sol LeWitt was the fruit of the Postmodern tree. He concretized a most etherial assertion into art-as-a-set-of-instructions, anticipating the Information Age by ten or twenty years. After quintessence, nothing of similar consequence could be plucked, so anything else conceptual or vaguely so was food for the fodder. Hence, the widely shared sense -slowly at first, then all at once- of diminishing vitality in the art world since the end of the 70's.

Starting in cloud misted mountaintops as dew dripping from tree branches, splashing cold into creeks, joining together into a river soon mighty and then mightier. What was once clear, slowly becoming cloudy and then brown and then more brown, widening with gathering force. until the delta spread driving towards some supposed ocean over the horizon. Tributaries fan out and the water is now slow, fetid, steaming, stinking. (Don't get me wrong, the ecology of marshlands are a wonder all in themselves.) This is where we are, where we've been for quite some time, deep in a delta phase. What this all adds up to is that even though we are 25 years into a 21st century, we are still caught up in the brambles of the 20th. We have yet to fully evaporate into cloud formations that could define the epoch we have been living into all this time. The 20th century art world -episodic- model just doesn't work anymore for us nowadays. Reconciling ourselves to this reality is the struggle we are in today. It's a shame that the supposed successor to the modern is uniquely configured to resist reality.

End: Interlude.

After the impact of Kissick's article apparently had died out, sprung a multitude of other writers from a whole spectrum, excellent to mediocre, essentially complaining about the fact that what we are seeing in the galleries and in the institutions is weak cheese. I wish that I had the presence of mind to compile an inventory of them as they were published, but trust me, after Kissick's salvo faded away, similar assertions reverberated in the commentariat, outside of the perilous framing of a critique of Social Justice. Red lights blinked on dashboards everywhere.

I haven't read deeply into Kissick's oeuvre but my sense is that he isn't a good writer -- or perhaps more to the mark, he isn't a clear thinker. In his "Painted Protest", he starts off with "My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery." and takes five paragraphs until one could get an inkling of his thesis. (Guess I should have written that in first person, oh well.) Later on in the article, he establishes his experience glorying in the globe trotting art world as the standard to measure the current contemporary art by. This, is problematic. These two examples and more only clouded what I think is his central point, one made by subsequent writers struggling to memory hole "Painted Protest" by critiquing en passant: We're in trouble, folks. We're mired in mediocrity and can't get out.

To Kissick's credit, he sort of sticks his critique in the first sentence of his introduction to his slim Perić publication: "...many things [...] are wrong with art criticism today." Four paragraphs later, he returns to his point:

The reason we want to encourage criticism now is because we feel that contemporary art is ailing, and that it is very important to talk about this. Major exhibitions are generally met with total indifference, art seems as stuck as the other 20th century forms -- movies, pop music, television, contemporary art -- and trouble keeps coming.

The problem with his title "WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY ART FOR TODAY? And what should it be for, if anything?" is that its' jalopy-like character enabled several of the contributing writers to avoid his central concern. Some dwelt on the nature of contemporary art, some on its' function, only a handful hit the bullseye. Maybe the book was assembled for enough time after the series of discussions to allow the meander, maybe the discussions themselves were hard to focus (most probably), maybe people didn't want to deal with what I'm asserting here as the central issue (no doubt).

Be this as it may, the roster of respondents -to what I figure was a request for contributions via email- is an interesting cross section into the thinking of as least one segment of the New York intellectual art world. I'm providing a short summary of each one, clearly my own assessment of what their essays are trying to say. Click on their name, and you'll find my annotations and commentary in each so you can verify if my summaries are correct or not.

What is this picture painting?

Splash Page
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction 1
Introduction 2
Introduction 3
Introduction 4

***

Domenick Ammirati: Today, art is just money. We are ending in a whimper.

Alvaro Barrington: Contemporary art is fast. Painting just has to catch up.

Gavin Brown: Contemporary art is a rat race in a dead end. His prescription is to return to comms of personal subjectivity and connections.

Caroline Busta: The future is networked nodes.

Joshua Citarella: We're fucked. Something something, poetry, something something. (In the key of trend analytics.)

Ben Davis: The conversation about art is better these days than probably the art itself.

Aria Dean: Contemporary art is an exhausted category. Art is radically free.

Travis Diehl: Art is all kinds of doing. Good art makes me feel ambivalent and uncertain.

Bridget Donahue: [Rambling, incoherent.]

Jason Farago: We have learned to live without great things.

Bettina Funcke: Art is something not to be consumed. Rather, it consumes you.

Nick Irvin: Contemporary art is bullshit. Get out while you can.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Art is a stone to be chiseled, revealing truth. Technology has rendered us into lab rats. The lab rats must reveal the truth.

Matthew Linde: Art/Fashion changes not vertically but horizontally from some kind of "outside".

Patrick McGraw: The world that places a screaming Wojak and a Tintoretto at the same level, short circuits art. The problem many sense is in a crescendo and art will prevail. I don't know how, but it will.

Hiji Nam: Art is a joke. Art should emulate jokes more. Humor will survive, so will art.

Seth Price: The question of what contemporary art is, is irrelevant. The luxury of its' spread is important.

Walter Robinson: Art is the assertion of subjectivity in the face of oblivion, it also has five functions.

Jerry Saltz: No one knows the purpose of art and it doesn't matter. Art goes on.

Roberta Smith: Art is the efficient conveyor of subjectivity.

Tobias Spichtig: The contemporary doesn't exist, it has been disabled by the NOW. [?] Art is spiritual and supersedes mortal grasping.

Natasha Stagg: The lassitude of the moment is an illusion. Imagination is the cure.

Sean Tatol: Art sold itself out. The datum of imagination that art promises is all around us, if only we could attune to it.

Andrew Norman Wilson: There's a way out of this current lassitude. You just have to find it, others have in related mediums.

Lloyd Wise: Yes, the present times are scary, but find a way to be thrilled by it in order to reanimate art.

If you know, then you'll know.

An artist's imagination, is not his imagination.
It is not his property.
It is not your property.
It issues not from him. It isn't his.
The artist uses media and the artist is a medium.
This is why we use a medium.
This too, is refraction.
Inspiration is the breathing of spirit.
The displacement is the power.
The grasp of power destroys all.

Ahora

Postscript and Prologue

***

Now that we've fully settled into our home for the summer in the Costa Brava, I'm becoming increasingly aware of my obligation to follow up and catch you all up on my last blog post regarding the announcement about my recently urgent health situation, prostate cancer. Today, I'm clocking past three weeks after that period of my life. Pardon my urge to put some distance between that seemingly interminable period of radiation therapy.

What sticks in my mind was the quiet meditative quality of those days. You see, the actual therapeutic procedure itself was quick, somewhere around 15-20 minutes. The routine upon the start of sessions was to present myself to the staff at the head of their monitoring station, essentially a desk in a vestibule stuffed with a row of computer monitors. They would ask me my "last four" (SSN, a VA Hospital security question), the date of my birth, and for me to state my name in full. This, a routine to make sure they don't apply the wrong procedure to the wrong patient. That done, I'm escorted to the room adjacent, where the external beam radiotherapy machine was sited. Despite my initial attempts to chat the staff up and pester them with questions about the machine, I was continually rebuffed, clearly evident it was that they were all about business and nothing else. So, I'm forced to describe the machine now and probably forever in prosaic terms.

The aesthetic was that of science fiction movies, think 2001, A Space Odyssey with a touch of Star Wars. White porcelain baked enamel or maybe simple plastic, grey durable surfaces where patients are in contact. Wood grain walls. The ceiling, rimmed in an array of LED's along the perimeter emitting mood lighting to induce calm; a drop ceiling tiled with backlit photographs of trees and sky (POV from below, I imagined the clouds and branches to be moving, an illusion that was hard to break with a stare), A suspended monitor to the side displaying incomprehensible data (to me of course), cameras and lasers to verify the position of the patient within the machine. A sliding sled was my destination, it was prepped with an array of bedding material whose foundation was material very similar to diaper fabrication, the significance about which I was later to learn quite vividly.

Shoes off, I flip my shirt up and on I hop onto the sled, down I go recumbent. The nurses draped a towel for modesty over my nethers and I then pull my pants down to my thighs. I am instructed to lay still like a sack of potatoes while they position my body to align with the guiding laser beams, aided by tiny dot tattoos earlier administered below the waist in preparation which, later on, they would augment with black fat marker lines in crosshairs. The nurses then asked me to confirm that it was indeed my photograph displayed on the monitor, a final precaution. They then turned on music, an additional layer to induce calmness. Many times, I wished I could have hooked up my own music playlist, but the serious demeanor of the staff was granite. Then, the sled slid with me into the machine.

The machine. It is a projection of four or five devices that orbits the body, an accurate count evaded me because some of them folded away and there were other more pressing concerns that had preoccupied me, more on that later. One pair was probably a simple x-ray, no doubt to document my current condition, organ disposition and most certainly to align the machine's beam to the markers within my prostate, hardware installed earlier as described perhaps too vividly in my previous announcement video.

The emission of probing x-rays have a characteristic sound, a rasping burst that you can probably recreate in your imagination. There's a whole other world of details I will withhold from this blog post about the restrictive dietary requirements that help render the diagnostic scan effective. In short, no fresh vegetables and no diary. This, a whole other universe of consequential description. Then happens, nothing... a pause, where I can only imagine that the team is gearing up for the main event. The principal tool of the machine is something I'll nominate with little exaggeration, the Eye of Sauron. A fat disk endowed with a glass lens into which the darkness within I could make out a set of something I'll call... grinding teeth, elements probably constituted of an x-ray absorbent material, a variable orifice to shape the beam upon emission. When Sauon orbits in action, he utters a sound which in my perhaps my too fertile mind resembled a predator devouring its prey. A more sober mind could identify this sound as the set of servo mechanisms behind. (But then again, I remember that such sounds weren't present when the eye was inactive and other rotations were in effect, supposedly also requiring servos.) The high energy x-ray beams targeted first my surrounding abdominal lymph nodes where the cancer cells had escaped the precinct of the prostate capsule and then later my prostate, proper.

But now I must here discuss the rub, the surprisingly difficult aspect that had turned what I had anticipated as a day at the beach into another meantime within the aforementioned meantime, which had become in turn an even meaner time. In the male anatomy, the bladder sits atop the prostate. When expended, the bladder deflates and its' form resembles a beret atop the head of the prostate gland. This is bad news for those tasked with wielding high energy particles into the gland in question. In order to mitigate this obstacle, nurses become highly concerned -almost fanatical- that the patient hydrates to the point where the kidneys are in high gear, filling up the bladder such that the beret becomes a soccer ball, distinguishing itself clearly and out of the way from the prostate. With all this in mind, I ask that you please indulge me with your imagination and put yourself prone onto the sled awaiting the Eye of Sauron.

The experience is like water boarding in reverse. (I was hoping to find a "How Stuff Works" website with illustrations, to no avail.) Instead of a wet towel over the head under a cascade of water, inducing stress... maintaining a distended bladder at the nurses' definition of peak performance involves a dry towel over your genitals and restraining a mercilessly engorged bladder impossibly tasked with restraining a huge reservoir of water... or urine, that is by then was mostly water anyway. Instead of attempting to withhold secret vital information, the mind is shouting all sorts of intel as Sauron sets to eat away so loudly with such bad table manners. I anticipate that this description so far is too abstract. Let's see if I can concretize the actual experience a little bit more.

We have all had the experience of needing to visit the bathroom while dining or drinking at a bar. As I'm sure you all can remember, the moment that available bathrooms are occupied. No problem, you wait patiently... and you wait... and you wait... but your bladder can't tolerate the loiterers occupying the bathroom in the way of blessed relief. A covert alley is nowhere nearby. There are no other alternative bars or restaurants of refuge nearby either. So, you pace and maybe you dance a little, or jump up and down if no one can see you. In real life, the bathroom door opens and perhaps a sheepish customer exits, thank god almighty. But in the case of the occupant of the sled, no such luck. It's only a few minutes, shouts the mind over and over, but the threat of a cascade is pounding savagely at the urethral sphincter's door. Resist the urge to reach down and manually pinch off, the invisible x-rays are working away and one can only imagine the damage that could do to your hand. You can do it, screams the mind but then now and again, and after all, only a few agains are too many, your urethra lets you down to your utter humiliation. Hence, the detail of the diaper-like material mentioned above. Remember, the material physics requires the bladder stay away from the orbiting stare of Sauron, so you try to pinch it off hands-free as the skin around your waist registers the reality of your 98°F / 36.5°C internal body temperature, so terribly badly the body wants to relieve itself of its' burden. Remember firmly, my prescribed protocol involved 45 sessions and the number of times that I had failed are too many to recount because even once evinces too much shame. Talking with other patients in the waiting room with me revealed I was not alone, and perhaps I could rescue some pride in imagining that my failure rate was on the lower end of the scale. Maybe this is simply mere special pleading. None of my fellow comrades went full Open Kimono... as I perhaps am flirting with now.

Only for you, my dear devoted reader. Only for you.

I'm tempted to append a diary I maintained of those 45 days... but that might be an open kimono too far. That diary is quite descriptive, of how I counted down the days, of how I tried to hack my body's internal hydration code, and of course the real ratio of success to failure within the parameter described above. I was only partially successful in how to calculate and limit the volume of water I had to manage throughout the day, especially the morning hours bracketing the actual radiation procedure.

THE EAR WORM.

These attempts at calculation formatted the whole experience and all what is written above is a prologue for the main message of this blog post, a postscript of what specifically I am driven to convey to you today, my audience.

A stick, a stone
It's the end of the road
It's the rest of a stump
It's a little alone

It's a sliver of glass
It is life, it's the sun
It is night, it is death
It's a trap, it's a gun

It takes an hour and fifteen minutes to commute to the hospital from my apartment in the Lower East Side, Manhattan. The hospital is located within Fort Hamilton, within sight of the Verrazzano Bridge and Gravesend Bay (ominously named, yes), sandwiched between Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, both iconic Brooklyn neighborhoods. Upon awakening each weekday, I had to hydrate my body in preparation for the procedure. Chugging water 45 minutes before hopping onto the sled is no good if your body is dehydrated. In order not to experience the bathroom scenario described above within the confines of the New York Metro subway system, I had to awaken at 3am. No problem, I love the wee hours anyway. The main parameter to bear in mind while hydrating is that the issue is not simply units in and units out. The body is a reservoir that once topped off, only then does it engage the renal function to fill up the bladder. This is a long way to say that a delay is involved in this affair, both before and after the procedure. My body's hydration needed time to equilibrate. So, the two and a half hours before I had to hop onto the D Train bound for the hospitalwere minimum parameters, for my body, at least. Everyone in the city is asleep of course and again, I love the wee hours.

Enter, the ear worm. It's not unusual for me to awaken with a song playing in my head. I find it delightful and often I try to divine any subconscious signification that might be involved... usually to very little avail. This time, as the penultimate week approached and passed into the countdown to the final day, the lyrics of Tom Jobim's Waters of March floated into my consciousness and firmly stayed put.

This time, I had never felt relief that I thought a countdown would bring. In the days of my youth as a sailor in the US Navy, it was customary to count down with glee. When I first crossed the pier to the quarterdeck of my ship with a fresh seabag on my shoulder, fellow sailors would peg the ID clipped to my collar, identify my discharge date and tease me about how much time I had left in service, "OOOH SHIT! Rocks don't live that long!" As the final months towards discharge approached, three digits turned to two and I was then able to say with glee what I had heard from others during the years beforehand, "I'm a two digit midget!" Counting down the 45 days didn't register the same joy this time. For some reason in the grind of pre and post procedure, generally costing me seven hours before entering my studio shortly before lunch, this rigid routine never broke even a small crack to allow the joy of anticipation of that final day of radiation to shine through.

The oak when it blooms
A fox in the brush
A knot in the wood
The song of a thrush

The wood of the wind
A cliff, a fall
A scratch, a lump
It is nothing at all

Jobim wrote his song in both English and Brazilian Portuguese, so I've heard. It was a message addressed to the world, no matter the hemisphere. It's a mediation on the seasonal end of a persistent rain, a prolonged annoying event requiring patience, understanding, and the wisdom to discover the little, small sparkling jewels hidden within its' difficulty. The first stanzas juxtapose the unity of opposites: "It is life, it's the sun / It is night, it is death / It's a trap, it's a gun", joyful and not forgetting for a second, the gravity of a hardship endured.

As the song continues, the noticing continues, tiny things could be wonderful if you only gave them a chance to be so.

For me, it was the early quiet hours where I could scan the headlines, read the news my friends would share about the art world, the books my friends would enthusiastically urge me to read. I was the only one awake initially, but Manhattan was stirring. Lights in bathrooms would spark and people started on their street paths of the day. Traffic surged slowly at first, and then the flood. I'd notice the same folks in the subway train. The construction workers with worn boots and pants, wearing clean t-shirts that won't be so soon, hardhats suspended from battle-worn backpacks and hand carts when heavy gear was necessary. That one older lady with a penchant for colorful dresses and ankle bracelets adorning her sandals, punctually going to work, getting off at the middle of the connecting bus route. Older guys I assessed to be fellow vets at the terminal end of the line. I welcomed the ritual unwrapping of my breakfast scone once the train passed 36th Street, to be savored slowly bite after bite until the train passed 79th Street.

It's the wind blowing free
It's the end of the slope
It's a beam, it's a void
It's a hunch, it's a hope

And the river bank talks
Of the waters of March
It's the end of the strain
The joy in your heart

The guards at the hospital, nodding in measured recognition as I grabbed my bag from the security scanner. Old guys, who looked like they've been around the block or two. The same staff, day after day, doctors and nurses and support teams streaming in from the parking lot with lunches in tow since the food in the hospital cafeteria was so typically horrible. (Why is that?) My fellow compatriot patients, old veterans, mostly from the Vietnam era, some of them taciturn, some beaming and one guy in particular happy to lift his shirt to show me the scar that had once been opened from his navel to throat. Most are black men, a Brooklyn metric probably. All dignified, some is subtle ways and most in very clear ways. Some fancy, not a few with swagger. I learned of their lives after service, some in law enforcement, some entrepreneurs. Some guys, not all that often, were on the brink of devastation, either of old age or of their various diseases. One very old guy in a wheel chair, pale and clutching a blanket to keep warm, accompanied by his private nurse, a man of few words but his furtive eye upon greeting was friendly and respectful.

Like I said, a lot of these guys are Vietnam veterans, most of whom I met were marked deeply in the meat of the war period. Only marginally qualified to be ranked in the same cohort, the war ended in my first year in service and during my first WestPac deployment. My only contact with that experience was when my ship rescued refugees afloat in the South China Sea. Hospital staff continuously thanked me for my service, and I felt a bit shy about accepting such gratitude. However, note carefully the gratitude abounding in that hospital.

The bed of the well
The end of the line
The dismay in the face
It's a loss, it's a find

A spear, a spike
A point, a nail
A drip, a drop
The end of the tale

Then there was the Radiological Department itself. Think, layers of an onion. The public face was the constant, genuinely kind smile of the lead receptionist, whose desk is festooned with small gifts given by years of former patients, a revelatory detail. She knew everyone's name.

One layer deeper, the two lead nurses who watched over my vitals weekly and were ready at hand if there was anything else I needed. Smocks and Crocs. Thank goodness my needs were few. There were other patients I've met who were not so fortunate. The nurses were there for them.

Another layer in the order of encounter are the doctors in residence, who helped me understand the nature and scope of my condition, what the various protocols indicated, along with the attendant up and downsides. I'm naturally inclined to be a bit impish when confronted with technical challenges and I'm reporting here that the doctors at this level were naturally generous with me. I've met others elsewhere where this was not so.

Down we go into the next layer, the doctors who are tasked with, let's say, is the more mechanical, mostly grisly, quasi surgical work. These guys (all guys) are stone faced, all business, no fooling around. Let this passage be a testimony of my discretion since there is much here to describe but it borders on gore and nether parts... enough said. I was the first patient to arrive at the unit every morning, and so I would greet each of the team as they freshly arrived, smiles and hellos with hand waving. Not so with these quasi surgical guys. Eye recognition, yes, but no frosting on top. All business, no fooling around.

Now we peel to the team of the radiological technicians, proper. There are about ten or so of them, rotating into smaller teams to stay fresh on the job. Young an old, mostly female, a wide range of ethnicities, they are to me facets of a jewel who each glittered in their own way. A couple were super serious, but I was able to get them to crack a smile now and again. One young guy, I almost got into trouble since he was disposed to entertain my persistent questions. This was frowned upon, his superiors told me to direct these questions to the head of the department. 45 sessions and 9 weeks allowed me to get to know them from a professional distance, witnessing the flashes of graceful patience and solicitude. They would trade off the task of coaching my hydration, and with this I was able to appreciate their different styles. Even when I touched initially and then occasionally upon my lowest point, they would let me know either explicitly or implicitly that they have seen worse. I've met some of the guys in the waiting room, they weren't kidding.

The core of the onion was the head of the department, whom I consulted with weekly. She too balanced generous solicitude and absolute no-nonsense. Leaders do color the character of their team, this is a law of the universe. In all of these passages describing the personnel, I've tightened up for the sake of discretion. They even frowned upon group photographs as I rang the bell on the last day.

My lips are sealed.

A sliver of glass
A life, the sun
A knife, a death
The end of the run

And the riverbank talks
Of the waters of March
It's the end of all strain
It's the joy in your heart

Every day, after I pissed out the morning charge (a non-trivial process), cost me another hour to get to Sunset Park via the NYC MTA where I could have three to four hours in the studio until I had to get home to work out at the local gym. Any later than that and my energy would be completely spent. The parallel protocol of hormone blockers have a tendency to waste my muscles and deplete my bones of calcium, so weight training is a prescription. The silver lining after the initial grind, this has its' own payoff in terms of wellbeing. All the aforementioned is punctuated with mild bouts of exhaustion. Then comes dinner and a streamed series with my wife and then to bed by 8pm.

This was my weekday, day-to-day, for a long time.

All these things and more -that now I am now beginning to forget- were the harmonics with which I resonated with in that Jobim song. Hard times have silver linings.

***

Complete lyrics to Waters of March, Antônio Carlos Jobim.

***

Postscript:
This will not be a cancer diary blog. Unless the situation turns worse -and there's no reason to anticipate this immediate eventuality- this kind of content, I will sunset immediately.

The central topic in this weblog is art: what I'm imagining / making, and the state of play of art history as we live it.

The Meantime and the Mean Time

No Judgement, Annotated.

The follow are screen grabs from my Notes application of Gordon Hughes' review of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Hal Foster's book, titled Exit Interview.

This is my favorite method of close-reading texts I like. Copy and paste it into
Notes, highlight, color fonts, underline, bold, italicize, change font size.

Color Key:

White & Red = original text

Red = emphasis

Red and Bold = more emphasis

Red and Bold and italic = more emphasis

Red and Bold and underline = more emphasis

Red and any of the above plus a bump in font size = even more emphasis

Blue = my commentary along the read

Green = clarifying interweb search

Really liked what Gordon Hughes had to say, extremely interesting. He touches on thoughts I've written about elsewhere in this blog. Intrinsic and extrinsic value, commodities and art objects, Modernity and the Industrial Revolution, the relation between the Modern and Postmodern, Duchamp (especially Thierry de Duve's writing), the inherent death wish within Western Civilization, deskilling, Ryman, the need to move past the End of History thesis...

Again, the images below are screen grabs. The links you see can't be clicked. Sorry about that. This is much easier than adding a hive of html's to the original text. Plus, I wanted to bust this out and get on with studio work.

These are raw notes, written on the fly paragraph to paragraph. More to come in terms of mapping out the facets of the diamond of Western Civilization and presenting it in a more succinct manner. A huge task, yes, but I feel compelled to do it before too much of my time on earth runs out.

Studio Visit with Aaron Parazette

Fresher Prey

Every so often, a group of artist and writer and artist/writer friends meet at Dallas BBQ in Chelsea. Over a group SMS, debates were raging over Dean Kissick's article in Harper's, The Painted Protest. Over the past couple of months in the chat, articles were dropping in, drip drip. By the time the meet happened at Dallas BBQ, everyone seemed exhausted with the topic. Hashing out the priority between art-for-art's-sake and art-for-politics had not only become tiresome but at least from my perspective, a dead end. Everyone else in the group seemed to share a variation of this sentiment.

Different people were working on drafts destined to be published soon in various publications. One was working on an article about the Guggenheim's Orphism show, questioning if it should be called a movement, whether it was initiated by the artists or assigned by others post facto. Another was writing a piece about how the Metropolitan Museum's recent installations seem over determined or over designed. Another was writing about a piece about how Kinetic Art never got its due.

All three seemed to me to share an over-arching concern about what has be recently called a vibe or vibe-shift. I thought that it was interesting, that this could be a way to move past the loggerhead problem of The Painted Protest debate, to talk about how the art world's conversation phases in and out periodically. I mentioned Becca Rothfeld's post in Substack: "what the heck is a vibeshift?", where she treats the idea of a vibe shift something like the phenomena of semantic satiation, where the constant repetition of a word often leads to an evaporation of meaning, in this case being a conceptual variety of it. Everyone was talking about vibes and vibe shifts and suddenly we find ourselves at a point where we don't know what exactly what we are talking about anymore.

I brought up a bon mot (at least I think so) that I had dropped in chat earlier: "The marquee always changes. This is its nature. The marquee must change." Identity Politics has had a long run now. What's next? Any ideas?

The cat had already had its' sport with the mouse and now it seemed to be dead and lifeless. It probably was. Uninteresting for felines. The group poked at the lifeless body and the conversation moved onwards to fresher prey.

Afterwards, returning home, I played with the carcass of the mouse a little more. My notes:

Some thoughts that might add up:

The proliferating rapidity of art movement generation at different stages of art history is spun up by an enthusiasm, consumption and exhaustion, the rate of which seems the same no matter when they happen, not really affected by accelerating modernity (what happened in the 1910's seems similar to post WWII & Vietnam years*), possessing a constant seemingly imparted by basic human character.

*Does war quicken art movement formation? 🤮

What qualifies the merit of an art movement, actually? Is it enough that a group of artists share inspired concerns and if so, how much deviation between their focus disqualifies the formation of a putative movement? Does such a concordance actually require a resonance echoed by critics and institutions? Is there a minimum degree of resonance? What's the smallest molecule of art history?

In connecting a collection of shared concerns across similar chained episodes in art history, is there a point when the links between dots can become too attenuated? Does the existence of sleeper art movements (arguably Duchamp, for example) disquiet our ability to know anything really substantial or make substantive claims with an air of finality when there might be others sleeping now in plain sight?

Can institutions spike the ball? Can they over manipulate the perception of an art movement? Distortion? When are thumbs on scales?

Is there a dynamic, something like an emergence property going on here?

While Rothfeld's piece was a toss off, her questioning "what is a vibe, actually" becomes something like semantic satiation where when we say a word over and over again, we lose its meaning. Could a similar thing be happening when we question what a vibe or vibe shift is, what an art movement is? A similar thing happens when we ask what art is, doesn't it? It seems that with some ideas or concepts, once you go too deep, it's (seemingly) impossible to surface again.

Messaging My Friend A

I had SMS messaged my friend A, these two TikTok links:

Aidan Walker (@aidanetcetera) intro to Historie d'Horreur and the phenomenon of Lakaka:

@aidanetcetera The lore de @lakaka , a great innovation in online literary forms. #lakaka #lore #oupigoupi #france #meme ♬ original sound - Aidan Walker

(LINK)

(Sometimes the embeds don't work. Don't know why.)

Historie d'Horreur, @lakaka.land:

@lakaka.land histoire d'horreur 😱 #dankmemes #catmemes #chat #brainrot #horreurtiktok #humour #offlain ♬ original sound - lakaka

(LINK)
***

He got cranky in reply because that's who he is. He's a brilliant guy with a heart of gold but he doesn't want anyone to know this. He replied with a terse:

"I don't have that app"

So I took the trouble to send the links to him again via email, taking not a little pleasure in knowing that I'm probably bugging him.

***

A's reply:

Unfortunately, considering how memes function is outside of my interest.
I've been rereading Deleuze's Bergsonism of late, a pleasurably confounding text.
These dorks are trying to wrap their heads around some of the concepts therein.
You will at least appreciate the room in which they sit. 

***

My reply:

A,

Beat for beat reactions:

First thought into the video: so, all is image. Nice summation: "..collapsing matter and memory..." referring I assume to the problem of bridging the perceiver and the noumena.

Genesis 26: Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness..."

Wait a sec. Is this Platonism?

Memory as flow. Then, memory was then thought of as a playback, that memory is a neural pathway etched in our brains, . Today, the idea of memory as a reconstruction, that memory is not summoned but instead reconstructed, recreated (and importantly, error prone) in our brains, The flow concept is not displaced, but maybe modifiable?

There's another idea in physics about time cones or timescapes, rendering the past and future more or less fixed.

T=6:00 in

A reliance on calculus. Lines tangent to curves. Slicing derivatives.

There's also a scratching going on in science suggesting that the brain is a transducer of reality past, present and future... not a singular mainframe. A self distributed, not a materialist singularity.

"Science of the day." Keeping up with the evolving debate would a good Bergsonian make. String theory just got dethroned, for example. Dark Matter might be a dead end, for example.

T=11:00

The reduction of the image: that's what a transducer does, a device that converts energy from one form to another.

Maybe, in order to live and navigate in a material world, our access to the totality of which our imaging slices is too much for a mortal capacity. A limited capacity just might be the only way to exist in this world, to live on an earth for any given time. A totality is another word for G-d and isn't it a thing in the bible that direct contact with G-d would destroy mere mortals? Therefore, the need for a GUI avatar like Jesus or a Holy Ghost to sweep a pathway towards the godhead.

"Ego consciousness is hte least conscious facets of our perception."

Nice:
"the image for Bergson is our own body. That is what we experience and what we always there... and it is an interrelationship with the entire universe, this is where Delueze's Plane of Immanence comes in..."

T=18:00

Man of action vs man of dreams.

My parents thought I was too day-dreamy and my dad used to say: "Son, you're like a chicken, born in a new world every day." Thanks, dad! 😂

Balance, a good thing.

Extracting advantage, good coinage.

T=23:00

Calculus reference. Shout out to Leibniz.

***

The dome? Bucky Fuller was the apex dork. I prefer Gaudi. Good but way-too-thorough presentation by Mark Bury at the Architecture Association. You might have to press your finger on the screen for 2x speed to get to the good parts 3/4 of the way in. Good stuff to get the real nut of parametric design:

Why I thought of you with the Historie d'Horreur and Lakaka:

The short bursts of storytelling adding up later in any order, the cats, the noir, the French attitude and his references to Godard...

...made me think of your oeuvre and how it operates in a similar way. Each thing you make could be likened to a TikTok video, viewing one after the other in any order of linkage could suggest a larger narrative with flexible interpretations, each of which are imbued with a certain attitude and character as your work is.

-D

Historie d'Horreur and Goddard:

@aidanetcetera Brainrot, Godard, and online cultural exchange. #lakaka #lore #godard #aboutdesouffle #brainrot #france ♬ original sound - Aidan Walker

Wish I could reveal who A is.

If I asked him, he'd probably say no.