Art

Modern Art

Posted to Art on the topic of Quotes on 24 January 2010, with no comments so far.

Two quotes I liked from Adam Gopnik’s article about van Gogh’s ear in the January 4 edition of the NYker. (Incidentally, I didn’t know before reading the article that van Gogh was notoriously, maybe even annoyingly voluble; I am curious now to read some of his letters, which seem to be available in Penguin Classics [...]

Perhaps You Were Thinking of Spending Thousands of Dollars on a Gift For Me?

Posted to Art on 8 November 2008, with no comments so far.

Might I ask you to consider this painting by Jocelyn Hobbie, which Tim says reminds him of me? It’s even called “The Writer.” She even has nice hands. Who sat for this painting? I like it. It’s airy, yet slightly sinister. I want a pony.

Enjoyed This Over Breakfast Yesterday:

Posted to Art on the topic of Readings on 17 October 2008, with no comments so far.

“Late Bloomers,” by Malcom Gladwell, in the current New Yorker. It’s about creative process, contrasting precocious wunderkind geniuses (like Picasso) with late-blooming masters of craft (like Cézanne). Gladwell describes these as two distinct types, but I have a feeling that the reality may be more of a continuum—a great Kinsey Scale of creativity. Definitely a [...]

Reading Frenzy, and Thoughts: Why New Yorkers Love and Hate to Read About New York

Posted to Art on the topic of Books on the topic of NYC on the topic of Readings on the topic of Videos on 16 October 2008, with no comments so far.

I’m in a reading frenzy recently: two thick novels in the last ten days. I inhaled ‘Then We Came to the End,’ by Joshua Ferris, and then moved immediately into ‘The Emperor’s Children,’ by Claire Messud. Purely by coincidence, each novel features an unstable character whose catalytic effects on the plot are driven by an [...]

“It’s a good place for a retrospective”: Louise Bourgeois @ the Guggenheim

Posted to Art on the topic of NYC on 12 September 2008, with no comments so far.

It’s a drizzly night and starting to feel like early fall. Alison and I just came back from the Louise Bourgeois exhibit at the Guggenheim. The exhibit is a retrospective. It showed work from the 1940s to today. It’s hard to imagine one person’s active working life spanning so much history, but there it all [...]

A Big Empty Room No More

Posted to Art on the topic of Images on 1 July 2008, with no comments so far.

…by which I mean, maybe I’ll start posting on this blog some.
I found this on Der Speigel’s website recently: Dieter Grube’s pictures of Berlin at night.

All the more special to me for the fact that they’re taken on slide film and not digitally manipulated.
I love the star-points around the street lamps: