Art Notes/Links?

But what artist isn’t interested in the gaps between our instincts and inhibitions Review by Sebastian Smee Washington Post, on Diane Arbus Exhibtion *Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited Through Oct. 22 at ***David Zwirner’s 537 West 20th St. gallery, New York. davidzwirner.com/exhibitions.

Art has to be a ghost in the machine of mass-media banality to reawaken such realities, hooking our hearts with the clothes, names and faces of strangers. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jul/15/genius-of-christian-boltanski

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth,so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind ofthoughts we wish to dominate our lives.” Walking (Henry David Thoreau)

powerless in competing with the work’s art-techno confluence in the screen culture swamp

“The pictures establish that though we are not central, we share in a mystery.” Robert Adams

The Cartesian duality of mind and body is no longer a favourable theory. The mind and the body are considered today to be interdependent entities. The evolutionary perspective gives us a better handle to understand the origin of consciousness and its ensemble of attributes that makes us human. It evolved through a synergy of multiple cognitive skills acquired over geological time as a response to emergent environmental exigencies. https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/evolution-human-intelligence-consciousness-social-order-brain-size/

Asked if he felt French, Klein said he did not. “But I’m at home with the French,” he said. “Hanging out with Americans: for me, that sucks.” William Klein

Music is the supreme exemplar of art as pure meaning because it directly animates the soul. All other art forms aspire to the religious condition but music is the utmost conduit to the truly transcendent encounter. Nick Cave

Far from playing a monolithically destructive role visa-à-vis the natural order, human need, desire, and agency are part of a rich, complex, and ancient tradition: “Instead of assuming the mutually exclusive character of Western culture and nature, I want to suggest the strength of the links that have bound them together.”

The Germanic mythos of forest origins, for example, of dark, mystical sources of racial virtue rooted in a prehistoric past, is quite different from the sense of New World continental expansiveness and heroic destiny in the lyrics of “America the Beautiful.” Simon Schama, Landscape & Memory

. . . a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media. Visual literacy skills equip a learner to understand and analyze the contextual, cultural, ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, and technical components involved in the production and use of visual materials. A visually literate individual is both a critical consumer of visual media and a competent contributor to a body of shared knowledge and culture (Visual Literacy Standards Task Force, ACRL, 2011). https://ivla.org/about-us/visual-literacy-defined/

Laing rings as true today as it did when he wrote it in 1960, in his book The Divided Self: “In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.”

Berger points out what is involved in seeing, and how the way we see things is determined by what we know. He goes on to argue that the real meaning of many images has been obscured by academics, changed by photographic reproduction and distorted by monetary value. Critical Theory for Photographers, pg 1

“better to spend money like there’s no tomorrow than to spend tonight like there’s no money.” PjO’rourke

The first sentence of the first wall text in the Cindy Sherman retrospective now at the Museum of Modern Art reads, “Masquerading as a myriad of characters, Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954) invents personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of representation, and the artifice of photography.” The images do no such thing, of course. They hang on walls. The pathetic fallacy of attributing conscious actions to art works is a standard dodge, which strategically de-peoples the pursuit of meaning