Ella and Louis singing Irving Berlin. Compliments of Dave Winer’s site, whom I discovered from my recent Twitter meanderings.
His quote: ‘So the Internet is a history and heart machine. It’s love and life. Flirting, dancing, swing, and yeah kisses.’
‘Save the World in Your Own Time’ is Stanley Fish’s new book. Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois, Chicago, he’s written for the New Yorker and writes the ‘Think Again’ blog for the NYTimes. He has interesting things to say about academe and ethics, and the resulting responsibilities of education. The main thrust of the universities, Fish writes, should be ‘the transmission and advancement of knowledge.’ But not opinion. This goes against what many want to claim as a moral imperative to heed current politics or culture in an arena where experienced thinkers are training young minds.Â
Disputing the idea that truth can be subjective, he suggests that in his classes there is no ‘some people say X, but others say Y and who’s to judge dance’. Rather, truth is a value that we must always ‘seek to envision’.Â
The idea that truth can be whatever one wants, is just as much hooey as the idea that everyone is an artist in their own way. Fish asks, ‘what is the truth?’ and not ‘what do you think’ in his classrooms. Anyone has an opinion, but this doesn’t explain or defend the truth. Truth must, as so many would rather not face, ‘stand up against challenges involving the quantity of evidence, the cogency of arguments, the soundness of conclusions, and so forth… Opinion-sharing sessions are like junk food: they fill you up with starch and leave you feeling both sated and hungry. A sustained inquiry into the truth of a matter is an almost athletic experience; it may exhaust you, but it also improves you.’
During discussions about truth, at least one person I know has suggested there is no one truth and can never be. Again, this goes to the heart of analytic critique and how to define value. From where are you getting your information, to what have you compared it, what is the historical reference? To suggest that truth is fluid like mercury, is to maintain no convictions and conduct no real analysis.
When truth is deemed so unnameable, the argument becomes circular, there can be a resistance to delve deeper into language and as a result, critical thought process. The student is ill equipped to do anything but that tired ‘who’s to judge’ dance. And this is exactly what Fish submits is wrong with the teaching system. Too many professors teach content or ideas and not grammar and rhetoric. On writing classes; get back to the basics and teach principles of the English language….and sentence structure. ‘Without a knowledge of how language works they will be unable either to spot the formal breakdown of someone else’s language or to prevent the formal breakdown of their own.’
History does wean out truth, through the process Fish describes. Although we’ve seen that subsequent eras and cultural changes can influence that truth, the means to analyze it remains clear.Â
Fish has gotten a lot of flack for his argument against judgements in academia. For example, he refuses to agree that the university has any place in a political stance. Dissecting ideas is one thing, recommendations are another.
after all that, one new piece.
My sister (a writer who copyedits for a living) just sent me this review of several new books on the business of making art and I wanted to share it. I’m currently painting like crazy and posting on Etsy. Her idea too. I’ve finished some smaller works that I began a couple of years ago during a trip to Galiano Island off the coast of Vancouver. And I’m finalizing some nudes that I worked on during classes at UC Berkeley in the late 90’s. I never painted over them and now I’m glad I didn’t.
I found at least one painter on Etsy (actually quite good) who has sold 300 of his smaller pieces in 2 years and gave me some tips. The idea that I could make a living from my  painting remains the holy grail. It sure as hell beats doing anything else.
One book that Ms. Bachner is slamming in the review cited above is ‘My So-Called Freelance Life’ by Michelle Goodman. Goodman claims that the artist/writer/whatever can be content in setting aside a few hours a week to the muse and this will suffice. As someone who tried that for the last 18 years, I can confirm that it doesn’t. I would spend hours  at my other ‘jobs’ in late afternoons or mid mornings, daydreaming about painting – my real job and passion. I would lapse during meetings to remember the light of an afternoon or dusk and long to rush home to capture the memory on canvas. I spent vacations traipsing off to rugged mountains and coasts to paint. Acting the tourist or going somewhere to discover the joys of the culture, or to relax, didn’t interest me. I simply wanted to paint during every waking hour. Â
And now, with practically unlimited time to myself and my passion, I can confirm that I’d rather sell all my paintings for under $50 each than to return to that other world and pretend that the ineffable need to create isn’t paramount. Maybe even less if it comes to that. The beauty – and curse- of having a talent is that it’s just about all you can offer. There is no choice and when it comes to sacrifice, nothing seems holy enough to counter that all consuming need. Â
As for the title of Genius, I doubt that Van Gogh would’ve claimed it for himself. It isn’t really about the end result, which only history will determine anyway, but more about the drive to pursue a voice. Having that voice matter to one’s self is the key to longevity, along with the ability to pursue a goal without a known endgame.Â
Her review, in excerpts here:
Genius and Heroin does what books like the recent anthology Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction utterly fail to do: it subtly but irrevocably shows how the life of a gifted person (meaning someone who, as Czeslaw Milosz put it, has a calling as a “secretary to the invisibleâ€) differs from the life of a, well, non-gifted person. It’s social suicide these days to admit that art isn’t “work†for you, that it’s something that happens to you as if you’re possessed, that to not create it would be like seeing a human baby bleeding and abandoned on a street corner and leaving him there to die, that you are dazzled by the electric words that come to you from some angel or demon or forgotten, ancient god. But the fact is that the creative part is erotic, and mystical, and rapturous, and deadly, and filthy, and horrible, and ecstatic. It can be agony, it can break you, but it’s not work. It’s the life part — the scrimmages with bureaucrats, the effects of late-stage capitalism, the housecleaning, the diseases, the copywriting — that’s work.
“Making time for the work you really want to do is about making choices and compromises when you have to,†Goodman concludes, “Some freelancers budget an afternoon or day each week for tapping their creative vein… Others flit from three-month bread-and-butter gig to three-month creative stint and back again. And some get the bulk of their annual creative work done during a few weeks a year spent at an artist’s retreat.â€
Certain art forms can thrive with this sort of compromise — filmmaking, for example, or ensemble theatre, can be done three-months-on, three-months-off — but all Goodman’s solutions are a killer for painting or poetry, which is why taking to the streets or working as a plongeur can seem more doable than writing the kind of fiction that you know will get you a particular fellowship, or working on a commissioned piece that matches the living-room set of a corporate wife.Â
Trying to regiment great art as if you’re throwing a neighborhood casserole party or writing a corporate report results in insidiously uninspired work. It’s not that you can’t be disciplined, but creating real work is different from the meaningless products of mundane society. The process is different. The dazzling, thrilling results are still different, even all of these years after a bunch of sour academics, unhappy geniuses and talented but hyperbolic writers have proclaimed the death of art.
If your genius is acting up, and you suppress it by treating it like a hobby, beware. You would (hopefully) not mistake a loosed, rampaging wildcat for a caged hamster. If you make a similar error of judgment with your genius, you risk the same thing: literal death. And if you win, and murder your genius, and do piddling, mediocre work that fits easily into your Sunday afternoon schedule, then you doom the rest of us (metaphorically or maybe not) to a world without the beauty of big predators, without the variety that frightening and exotic animals bring, without menace, awe or surprise.
Genius: no matter what your life situation, your real work is happening to you anyway, and you can’t stop it. If you try to stop it, or you get a block, you go crazy and want to die. Hobbyist: you feel like if you started writing, or started painting, you would be more fulfilled. Genius: You already do your real work, period. You have no choice. Hobbyist: You’d like to learn how to be a great writer or artist by studying with someone you admire. Genius: Your work does battle with you, insisting that it’s good or right when you wanted it to be about something else entirely, or letting you know it’s inauthentic even when you’ve carefully constructed it. Hobbyist: you want to learn to tap into your inspiration. Genius: the demon inside you is like a tapeworm.
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A friend, an inspired filmmaker, agreed to recommend me for a large and prestigious grant. He suggested that I write something to the effect of ‘I’m on fire, give me the money!’Â
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This is from a life class at UCBerkeley, Â in ’98. I was taking so many classes when I lived and worked in San Francisco that I might as well have been enrolled. This reminds me a little of David Park, whose work I admire. Check out the link, you can see his daughters and others discussing his methods. I added the background recently, based on the light I remember from trips to Mendocino.
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This series of small oils (9″x12″) originally sketched out in acrylic, began in 2006 on a trip to Galiano, in the Gulf Islands off the coast of Vancouver Island. I stayed in a house on the cliffs and could paint from my deck and kitchen table. The sea and light were sublime.
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and this is my latest from early winter;
I’m having a sale on small works at my newly opened Etsy shop. Please stop by and browse. Better yet, buy something!
Happy New Year!
I heard this on NPR this morning and it’s worth posting again. If you’re talented or lucky enough, you can launch your own career on public radio. Happy holidays!
I”m reading Peter Schjeldahl’s ‘Let’s See’ and agree with some of James Panero’s review in the NY Sun. ‘Mr. Schjeldahl’s ceaseless promotion of the histrionic contemporary artist John Currin, for instance, would put a publicist to shame’ or ‘Too often in the decade (the last one) covered here, Mr. Schjeldahl followed the money rather than good conscience.’ Having seen Currin’s play with gimmicks, the elongation of body parts and clever satirizing of sexual clichés just doesn’t do it for me.  El Greco distorted with something in mind other than cynicism – a passion to involve the viewer in the spiritual ecstasy he felt himself.
But some of Schjeldahl’s opening comments hit home. ‘Baudelaire called the artist a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. I think it’s self-evident. Artistic temperament sets in at an early age, though it may not be realized until later, if at all.
Unlearnable, the vocation of art entails idiosyncratic strategies for learning… Sincerity and belief in something are indispensable, never to be compromised; but they are perfectly consistent with sophistication and even guile.’
So much for the degree and a formal education being of service in the hands/mind of the artist. Schjeldahl himself admits to being a college dropout; ‘it saved me from teaching’. A belief in what one creates is difficult at best in a world that values commerce over craft. But it’s all the artist really has to work with and to paraphrase what Dylan said, ‘if you don’t believe in yourself, why should anyone else?’Â
I also like what he says about art standing still – ‘it doesn’t alter, we do….Most artists understand that their work’s effect should be permanently instantaneous.’
I recently had someone volunteer to return a painting over a dispute about its almost 30 year old provenance; it was initially given to one friend and then sold to him almost immediately afterwards, by said friend. He couldn’t remember how it got to him and the recipient couldn’t remember selling the piece to this guy. Adding to the surrealism of this episode, she also couldn’t remember my giving it to her, and had no memory of the work itself. It was like being in my own Sedaris story. The buyer supposed that if he returned it to me, the originator, that the ‘karma’ would get worked out. Â Art simply doesn’t work that way, there is no transference of anything except the initial meaning of the piece-assuming that it’s interpreted correctly in the first place. To think otherwise is to be blinded by phoney karmic duty or some kind of wacky phenomenology that doesn’t enter into art at all.
An axiom one fellow artist has is to never sell or give work to a client who doesn’t deserve or appreciate it. It could also be said that commerce in art comes with its own set of morés, well described in Anthony Haden-Guest’s ‘True Colors’ and his remarks about how dealers create markets.
I also like what Schjeldahl says about beauty and art in relation to an exhibit described by the curator in a typical mush of a sentence that so many people mistake for actual meaning; ‘today beauty might be praised as a concept that acknowledges regular shifts in cultural perception’.
PS’s response: “Beauty is not a concept. To begin with, it is a common word, defined in the dictionary as ‘the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind’. Unless we are desperately sad or angry, we have occasion to use the word every day…Beauty harmonizes consciousness from top to bottom. It is as organically vital as digestion.Â
We don’t depend on new art to provide us with beauty. Don’t blame the artists for this. Ever since art lost the patronage of clerics and aristocrats who required beauty to promote their authority, it has been stuck with the scarcely voluptuous agendas of bureaucratic and educational institutions, novelty-craving commerce, political ideologies, and, in the best instances, rawly ambitious and audacious individuals.
There is every accounting for taste, but no accounting for beauty. Beauty sails past the office in the brain where the accounts are kept- and where failed beauty accumulates. …Beauty isn’t beauty if it doesn’t inspire awe for a specific proposition about reality. Beauty makes a case for the sacredness of something- winning the case suddenly and irrationally. It is always too late to argue with beauty.”
This is like trying to explain what falling in love means. And it’s just as much of a conundrum to the deluded soul who thinks it can be either controlled or managed.Â
Finally he accuses the exhibit of trying to think too much. ‘It tries to put intellectual handles on a phenomenon that suppresses intellect altogether, to the understandable dismay of theorists and scholars. Beauty isn’t articulate…or nice….Beauty presents a stone wall to the thinking mind. But to the incarnate mind- deferential to the buzzing and gurgling body- beauty is as fluid, clear and shining as an Indian- summer afternoon.’
It’s refreshing to hear an art critic denounce the circumlocation that so much writing on just about everything, including art, devolves into today. The worst is unclear and muddled, the best merely a string of dislocated and gummy adjectives. That kind of amateurism doesn’t place much truck in Hemingway.
as someone who’s failed to grow these in the dense, clay soil of Georgia, it’s always a minor miracle when I can succeed at getting decent carrots to thrive in my gardens. When I lived in the midwest near a river, I could grow them and now success again on my Chester County 1/2 Acre, that once backed up to a horse farm. These were just harvested today, after a couple of freezes and one snow. They were planted in late summer.
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Buddy thinks there is turkey waiting for him.
This may be finished. I’m including the sketch, its origin. Another sketch from across my ‘road’.Â
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I saw the Richard Serra retrospective ‘Sculpture: Forty Years’ last summer at MoMA. Walking through and around his pieces really affected me and although it’s now a year later, I’m again infatuated with the idea of space and large works of art.
The way he describes an artist’s path in the video interview below is terrific. And he draws every day…
This is not a man for whom the term art is taken lightly. Artists for him, are the supreme arbitrators of intellectual problems in their field. That excludes architects and buildings, furniture, craftsmen of all kinds, and the idea that a person is a work of art.Â
“Art is purposefully useless and that’s what makes it more free than buildings.  There are aspects in buildings that you can say deal with the providence of sculpture or that deal with the overlay of painting. …Buildings are not works of art, they have something to do with religion and social contexts of the time and keeping people under a certain kind of moral imperative about transcendence and God, but they have nothing to do with the nature of what art has always been.Â
Everything is coming up yellow. I have a new larger piece in the works, but here are the photos first. I began a pastel sketch from my back porch and worked from that. In a couple more days I should have the painting posted.
