Like the members a '60s reunion band, 50 protestors gathered in Manhattan's Columbus Square last week for the "Ruins of Modernity Tour." The event—meant to be a raucous gallery tour at the Museum of Modern Art—was the fourth of 10 planned protests against MoMA, whose donors...
Art—and the outdoors—are calling! Look for my outdoor exhibit at Art Fest at Whitehall, Sunday, April 25, noon-4 pm. It's your chance to save sales tax and shipping on every one of my paintings. The festival features live music, fun food, and exhibits by more than 100 regional...
The work of art provides us with new organs with which to see the world. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty We understand the world thanks to the nonfungible mental tokens we call "ideas." Ideas bridge internal and external reality and allow us to say, "Yes, I get it, I understand." But—unless...
“In art it is hard to say anything as good as saying nothing.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein People who speak harshly of painters, but don't themselves paint, irk me. Even when they speak harshly of mediocre painters. Compared to these critics, painters—even masterful ones—are always more congenial. That's true in all...
Painting a "picture" is meaningless. One paints beauty. — David Leffel In perhaps my favorite semester of college, I took a philosophy course on beauty. Philosophers call the study of beauty "aesthetics" and for 2,500 years have argued over aesthetics questions like "does a painting actually exist?" and...
Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him. — Lord Chesterfield Originally, "slow food" founder Carlo Petrini didn't mean to start a global movement 3o years ago. He merely wanted Europeans to preserve local cuisines. But Petrini's "Slow Food...
Creativity takes what it needs from the person who possesses it and discards the rest. — Peter Schjeldahl New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl once observed that, for viewers, subject and medium always transcend a painter's thoughts and feelings. I think that's why, after just a few weeks,...
Painting is another way of keeping a diary. — Pablo Picasso I dashed off Social Distancing last March, the morning I realized Covid-19 was not just some flu, but "really real." Since that morning ten months ago, 389,000 Americans have died of the virus, including a close family...
Crime, money, power, drugs—are all linked. — Matthew Vaughn Community activists in Los Angeles, peeved with the proliferation of art galleries in the once-poor Boyle Heights neighborhood, charged local developers four years ago with a sleight-of-hand they named artwashing, the first known use of the word. Disingenuous businessmen,...