Responding to Aldouri’s mandate to make art mean something again, not just produced for First Friday consumption, might we be able to create the requisite “distance from the imperative to make and exhibit” by rediscovering the energies that animated Plato, Aquinas, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and subsequent moral philosophers, sociologists, theologians, and secular humanists to engage in the agony of confronting art with morality, thereby suspending this malignant “superabundance of production”?
Read MoreIn 1948, The New Yorker published a story about idyllic small town America where everyone knows everyone’s name. Each year those names are placed into a box and townspeople gather as one name is retrieved and the owner of that name is then publicly stoned to death. The story is The Lottery, and it remains Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece.
Read MoreToday we have many things to contemplate. Whether out and active or quietly staking out your own territory for action, here are three links with material worth contemplating. Thank you, Matthew Rose, for passing along the Artsy link.
Read MoreDave’s check-in with the Art Commission ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the upcoming transformations to the Parkway branch of the Free Library, to the future of illuminated billboards from the Philly Parking Authority.
Read MoreWith this constant flux of activity, the capacity to view, look, and reflect about art is rendered significantly more difficult. The upshot to the universalization of endless artistic productivity is a certain prohibition against thinking about the art made and displayed. What matters is not what the art means or does—a judgement that often takes time to work out—but participation as a free-falling spectator in the mad flux of artistic creation.
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