(no subject)
Working a really short day is very pleasing. Soon it will be warm and I will have time to just be outside. Even the lawn work I am excited to start, pulling out old bushes and stuff like that. I want to enjoy things now. I made carbonara and I finally am able to do it without scrambling the eggs. When I make it I like to put a lot of black pepper in it.
I had some black pepper triscuits and at first they were hard to eat, but I kept eating them. It is strange to have this kind of compulsion. It's a type of flavor that you don't typically experience in a very intense level, not like sugar and salt where it's so common because everything has 40 grams of sugar and a ton of salt so to most people it feels like it's just natural. This morning I went to the cafe and they had some kind of orange coffee and I tried a little cup of it but I really didn't like it, but I wondered if I would be craving it later. It hasn't happened; it just tasted like coffee in a cup that someone didn't wash the orange juice out of at some diner.
And I started to thumb through Keith Haring's journals. I've had the book for a few years and I never read the whole thing. The impression I get thumbing through it is that the first portion is a lot of avant-garde writing that a person might do if they're taking courses on semiotics and stuff around 1980, and then the rest of it is stuff you look at for gossip about the 80s art world. It's a book that I like to read by looking at the index. Every book should have an index I think, and if it doesn't have one it lowers my opinion of the book. I like to be able to just see topics laid out in alphabetical order and think "I wonder what he thought about Frank Stella." He seems to have thought Stella's work was a kind of joke and to have been affronted by Stella's 80s stuff, especially as parsed through Robert Hughes. It seems Hughes must have written some review praising Stella as "the only artist to make serious work out of graffiti" or something.
I don't think there are still any actual critics who write stuff like that, but it seems like all the idiot clickbait blogs act as if the notion of quality and old men's attempts at arbitrating it is still some scourge they need to protect the world from. A lot of attempts at art criticism today I feel just comes from a place of pettiness. It's high school newspaper-level discourse.
And I started to imagine what it would be like if you were the juror for a juried art exhibition. In my experience, so many juried shows are such that over half of the work I wouldn't even look at. But if you agree to do one, you have to select some sort of quota. Sometimes I wonder if jurors end up selecting the worst work they can as a sort of "fuck you" to the entire miasma of applicants. There have been cases where I am certain that must be the case. But maybe they really do just look at stuff as if quality weren't in any sense real. Even with that possibility though, there's stuff that you can't possibly associate with any sort of stock discursive issue or theme.
Haring also writes in the entry on Stella "I am wondering if the museum world will ever embrace me like this (IE with a retrospective, purchasing and displaying works), or if I will disappear with my generation." I guess museums really haven't? That seems peculiar.
I had some black pepper triscuits and at first they were hard to eat, but I kept eating them. It is strange to have this kind of compulsion. It's a type of flavor that you don't typically experience in a very intense level, not like sugar and salt where it's so common because everything has 40 grams of sugar and a ton of salt so to most people it feels like it's just natural. This morning I went to the cafe and they had some kind of orange coffee and I tried a little cup of it but I really didn't like it, but I wondered if I would be craving it later. It hasn't happened; it just tasted like coffee in a cup that someone didn't wash the orange juice out of at some diner.
And I started to thumb through Keith Haring's journals. I've had the book for a few years and I never read the whole thing. The impression I get thumbing through it is that the first portion is a lot of avant-garde writing that a person might do if they're taking courses on semiotics and stuff around 1980, and then the rest of it is stuff you look at for gossip about the 80s art world. It's a book that I like to read by looking at the index. Every book should have an index I think, and if it doesn't have one it lowers my opinion of the book. I like to be able to just see topics laid out in alphabetical order and think "I wonder what he thought about Frank Stella." He seems to have thought Stella's work was a kind of joke and to have been affronted by Stella's 80s stuff, especially as parsed through Robert Hughes. It seems Hughes must have written some review praising Stella as "the only artist to make serious work out of graffiti" or something.
I don't think there are still any actual critics who write stuff like that, but it seems like all the idiot clickbait blogs act as if the notion of quality and old men's attempts at arbitrating it is still some scourge they need to protect the world from. A lot of attempts at art criticism today I feel just comes from a place of pettiness. It's high school newspaper-level discourse.
And I started to imagine what it would be like if you were the juror for a juried art exhibition. In my experience, so many juried shows are such that over half of the work I wouldn't even look at. But if you agree to do one, you have to select some sort of quota. Sometimes I wonder if jurors end up selecting the worst work they can as a sort of "fuck you" to the entire miasma of applicants. There have been cases where I am certain that must be the case. But maybe they really do just look at stuff as if quality weren't in any sense real. Even with that possibility though, there's stuff that you can't possibly associate with any sort of stock discursive issue or theme.
Haring also writes in the entry on Stella "I am wondering if the museum world will ever embrace me like this (IE with a retrospective, purchasing and displaying works), or if I will disappear with my generation." I guess museums really haven't? That seems peculiar.