Categories
Quotation

Absurd

Art is about the maker. Its aim: to be an expression of who we are. This makes competition absurd. R. Rubin, The Creative Act

Categories
Quotation

Ambition

Ambition for wealth is the enemy of artistic excellence. Leon Battista Alberti (ca. 1436)

Categories
Musings

Schoenberg on Art

Arnold Schoenberg reportedly said: If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art. This comment seems to call into question Karl Ove Knausgård’s link between challenging art and Protestantism, not because Schoenberg doesn’t agree that art is difficult but because Schoenberg clearly didn’t link art […]

Categories
Quotation

Unlikable

So I am pleased that you find «Ti con zero» “likable”; but the more unlikable a book is (that is, hard to take in, because of our habits of thought and our tastes) the more it counts; the more laborious it is to take in, the more it counts I. Calvino, The Written World, 64

Categories
Create

Creativity Needs No Audience

I envy Vivian Maier. Not because I like her work — I have seen too few of her photos to know what I think of them, though I doubt they would appeal much to me. No. I envy Vivian Maier because she seems not to have cared whether or not I liked her work, or had […]

Categories
Create

Audience of One

I went to see a show last night, an album celebration show. The music was great, but what really impressed me was the musicians. Sure, there were a number of people there to see the show, but our presence was irrelevant. Watching the band play and especially E.J., the front man, I saw a person […]

Categories
Create

Ashford Farm Photo Book

I make “limited edition” books, something between art books and photo books. They are often experiments that will never move beyond my work table, hence the “limited edition” label. I play with format, with layout, with folding pages or cut pages. Some are little more than pamphlets. I always learn something from these books. This […]

Categories
Quotation

Protestantism and Art

Whenever I see a new picture I immediately seem to like and find aesthetically pleasing, I am suspicious. This cannot possibly be good, I think to myself. This cannot possibly be art. It feels like the spontaneous pleasure, the immediate sense of aesthetic satisfaction I derive in such instances is too easy and too shallow […]