Posts

Showing posts from March, 2018

Elegiaic Reserved Thoughtful Tripe

Image
There is a film of some fruit in a jar by Tacita Dean... According to the Guardian's art editorial this eleven minute film is: Elegiaic. Reserved. Thoughtful. Epic. Intimate. In touch with history.  Elemental. About decay. About nostalgia. Treating contested geographical borders. Has a deep back story. About the death immanent of things. It is an editorial and I can't find the by-line. I imagine the author is too embarassed to admit to writing such tripe. It is easier to say "Thoughtful" than to think. It is easier to say "Epic" than to create. Anyway that was the last straw. I listen to arts podcasts and read reviews of art, books and films in the hope or learning about something brilliant lovely interesting new. But only 10% of what is written or said by the critics makes any sense. The rest is pompous and pointless. So I'm going on a diet from critics, the pain of the 90% cannot be offset the pleasure of the

Freakonomics Wilful Blindness Buddhism's one pointedness

Image
You become a monster when you don't concentrate... A Freakonomics podcast... ...speaks of Continuous Partial Attention, never concentrating on a single thing. Willful Blindness by Margaret Hefferman...  ...explains that attention is not divisible . Buddhism has the idea of one pointedness... So when we are discussing the angle of a mechanical cut, and at the same time you are emailing a Japanese distributor about pricing, and you say "I'm listening I'm listening..." you are deluded or lying.

Aurora

Image

The first and last real conceptual art work, Duchamp's urinal.

Image
The first and only really original conceptual artwork was Duchamp's urinal. A "found object" as art. The next imaginative leap should have been: " The whole universe is a found object, we can appreciate that, we don't need to create other conceptual art. Nothing can beat the universe. " But that thought would not feed the art market nor the ego of the artists. So was born the idiocy of conceptual art, poor in concepts, rich in wool to pull over eyes. The upside is that many people create art ignoring the art market. John Craxton for example. And maybe you . Do it. Create it. Fuck'em all.

Before Life's Liquor In The Cup Runs Dry

Image
I've learned part of the The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám and one of the lines came to my mind as I sat on the sofa with a glass of wine balanced on the arm. " Come my little ones and fill the cup, before life's liquor in the cup runs dry. "  And the wine was nearly finished... ...and it occurred to me that the level of wine left in the glass might show how many years I have left to live. So when I was born I had a full glass. Now I don't. So I'd better get on with all those things I want to do and keep putting off. Strangely the thought was not morbid. Maybe I didn't really believe it, but certainly more than half my life has already gone. There's a Buddhist saying "Those who are mindful will never die." I personally take it to mean that if you are awake to life you'll enjoy it better. And when you die you won't know it. There is a sort of infinity there, everything you'll ever know is what you know whe

Val Wilmer said an interesting thing...

Image
I heard a program about Val Wilmer , an English jazz journalist who knew all the greats. She made an interesting point: In the last hundred years black music and cinema are the two art forms which changed the world more than any other. Without black music... ...there'd be no Beatles, Kinks, Rolling Stones or Elvis Presely, and all that followed. And maybe without black music there'd be more racism. What ever Tacita Dean says about how important Cy Twombly's handwriting is for art... ...she's speaking to a navel gazing elite. Neither Dean non Twombli will be remembered in another hundred years. But I bet the musicians above are. (And the critics gush and fawn on Dean, Twombli, Kapoor, Cross , and their ilk, without ever seeming to understand anything real.)