Amy Sillman and the State of the World of Art

 In the preceding post, on Flannery O'Connor, I wrote the following:

"In the age of Cancel Culture, the significance or worth of a piece of art is determined far more by the racial/gender/sexual orientation of the artist than by the attributes of the object in question. One need only read the arts pages of the New York Times in current times to see how that works."

To reinforce that notion, the lead article of the "Weekend Arts" section of the Oct. 9, 2020, NYT, about the painter Amy Sillman, contained the following observation by the author of the piece, Jason Farago:

"Yet the rolling crises of the past few years have brought along a shift in art galleries toward easy-to-read, politically forthright imagery, some of it righteous, some just agitprop. It's a time more prone to the certainties of rage than the ambiguities of art."

Farago positions Sillman's abstractions -- full of ambiguities one might argue -- as a counterpoint to that trend. "I was thinking about looming," the artist said in response to the off-center, somewhat out-of-balance images that dominate her current show at Manhattan's Gladstone Gallery.  In other words, like the current U.S. presidential election, things that seem about to happen but haven't happened yet.

It's an evergreen notion so if you acquire one of these images, it won't get stale -- from that perspective, at any rate.  Bur there is no need to rush to buy a Stillman image, it would appear. Farago reports that Sillman has made "hundreds" of abstract paints during just the past 12 months.

The NYT piece also serves to illuminate another aspect of the art world that is far from new.  It's as much about celebrity as it is about imagery. The accompanying picture of Sillman herself is far larger than the pictures of her art and the only image on the front page of the Arts section.

While details of Sillman's personal life are scarce to non-existent in what one can easily read about her, some of her work appeared in a 1978 exhibit entitled "A Lesbian Show" that was curated by an artist named Harmony Hammond.

According to Art News, "the show was an energizing political statement about lesbian visibility, creating a community of artists who publicly identified as lesbian -- and risked professional discrimination by doing so."

Well, that was over 40 years ago and how times have changed!

To Sillman's credit, however, she is not riding that horse. Unlike a number of others in the art and entertainment worlds these days, she does not explain her paintings as images seen through "the lens" of her sexual orientation, or gender, or race, or whatever. Rather, she talks, in the NYT piece and elsewhere, rather refreshingly as to how they fit into the history of art.

Street Haunting May Shed Light on Clarissa Dalloway

When a certain type of novel is published, readers often wonder, to what extent is it autobiographical? And if the author is or becomes a literary celebrity, entire industries can develop around such questions.

Virginia Woolf, because of her difficult childhood, her episodic mental/emotional instability, her apparently sexually sterile marriage and her unconventional friends, has been the subject of endless inquiries along those lines – facilitated by extensive diaries and letters as well as her fiction, essays and critical works. There’s no shortage of fodder upon which to chew.

What, then, about Clarissa Dalloway? Where did she come from and how does she relate to the author herself? 

The Importance of Disruption in the Arts

When one hears the word "disruption" these days, it is generally in the economic context -- venture capitalists searching for the next big high-tech startup capable of upsetting traditional means of doing business and reaping billions of dollars in profits by so doing.

But according  the editor of T, the New York Times Style Magazine, disruption is just as important as a means of advancing the arts.  The Oct. 22, 2017 edition of T is devoted to "the greats" -- seven living persons chosen collectively by the publication's staff as being exceptional in their fields for arguably bringing about fundamental change.

A Paperless Society? Not When Bill Gates Reads Books

I took a break from blogging during most of the month of December, passing up many interesting topics in the process, but instead, got a number of other things done. So I'm starting the New Year with more of a clean slate than usual.

Here's a very brief item to get back into harness.

The New York Times has a story today (Jan. 2, 2016) about Microsoft founder Bill Gates reviewing books on his blog Gates Notes.  No surprise, as a celebrity, when he recommends a book, a bounce in sales follows.

What would we, a nation of sheep, do without celebrities? How in the would would we know what to  eat, what to drink, what to wear and (think Oprah) what to read?

What struck me about the article was not what Gates has been reading -- non-fiction for the most part, it appears -- but how he reads. According to The Times, not in an electronic format.

"Mr. Gates says he reads about 50 books in a year, eschewing digital readers for old-fashioned books on paper. When he is busy with work, he reads about a book or two a week but will consume four or five in the same period while vacationing with family," the newspaper reported.

One advantage of paper is that one can scribble in the margins.

"He (Gates) rarely posts negative reviews of books, explaining that he sees no need to waste anyone’s time telling them why they shouldn’t bother reading something. He doesn’t spare himself, though. 'I have a habit, which I don’t recommend, of finishing essentially every book I start,' he said. 'And if I disagree with a book I spend lots of time writing notes in the margins. Perversely, this means that the more I dislike a book, the longer I spend reading it.'" the article said.

I like to scribble notes in the margins of books that I read, too, but generally not to argue with the authors. It's a way to more easily get back to material I like or think is interesting or important.

Fortunately, Gates isn't the only one who finds books in print more satisfying that a stream of text on some electronic device. We are fortunate to have a bookstore a block and a half away and it is doing exceptionally well -- right under the nose of Amazon, which, by the way, recently opened its own bricks-and-mortar store selling books in print at our local high-end shopping mall.

Quote of the Day: Never About One Thing

"A poem is never about one thing. .. . You want it to be as complicated as your feelings."

That from an article in the March 29 issue of the "New York Times Magazine," entitled "Galaxies Inside His Head" and subtitled "Race and Identity in the Poems of Terrance Hayes."

What Hayes appears to be suggesting is that he packs his poetry with multiple issues – and perhaps not in a linear fashion.

Like a good wine, complexity is critical.

That's one way of looking at the notion of "more than one thing."

But there is an alternative. Poems, and arguably stories, are chiefly about more than one thing because readers interpret the same work differently and not because of anything the author says.