Scarlet Letter cover by Ruben Toledo
[W]hile you are free to stare at a blank ream of paper for 1000 hours, your publisher will only laugh [if you do]. Jeff Koons can have his interns paint his ideas, John Cage can sit in front of a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, but writers lack the auspices of conceptual absence. Even conceptual writing requires that slow painful aggregate of words, one at a time, making something from nothing. Every word is work. There is no short cut.
—Jimmy Chen on the difference between conceptual writing and other types of conceptual art
But are we making things for the people of our epoch or repeating what has been done before? And finally, is the question itself important? We must ask ourselves that. The most important thing is always to doubt the importance of the question.
—Orson Welles
Forgive me if I’m stating the obvious, but if certain people would just own up to their fascination with people, and especially people who live wild, transgressive, stupid, uninhibited, exciting, dangerous lives at the edges of the law and social convention, then maybe we wouldn’t have blurry polaroids of drugs, sex and crime, semen-stained collages and vandalized hotel rooms proclaimed iconic art.
It’s truly weird that in some circles, it’s considered ok to praise crappy pictures (so long as they show sex, drugs and rock&roll) or installations based on vandalism and bodily fluids, but it’s not ok to admit that you’re just really fascinated by the life the artist is living. Let’s just admit it: a life lived over the edge, cool or not, trendy or not, wise or not, is really interesting. It draws our attention like flies to a lightbulb. Maybe there’s something juvenile about it, maybe something else, but it’s clearly a tendency that many of us, many grown adults, have. I wonder how recent a trend this is and how much “art” is really a pretense for being fascinated by its creators. Who hasn’t occasionally wanted to experience living at its most extreme, completely uninhibited by social norms and common sense? Just to feel what it’s like? It’s understandable that when an individual who apparently does live that life comes along, we’d be interested. If we never dare to live that life ourselves — or if we’re wise enough not to try — then the next best thing is to spend time with, observe and listen to those who have. But of course you can’t admit that that’s your motivation, so you invent a pretext: you care about their art. It’s really about the art. All you want is a taste of the enthusiasm, the lack of inhibition, the fresh energy, the will to live, and so on, but, living a life very much constrained by what others think, you need a respectable facade to hide behind.
Lives are not art, but I suspect that the “performance” that is the lives of certain artists is what most of their enthusiastic audiences are really after. Certainly, I’ll admit that I don’t care much about shit (sometimes literally shit) presented as “art”, but that doesn’t stop me from being interested in the wild personality of the “artist”.
Interesting thoughts. Not sure what I think about it, but very interesting nonetheless.
The Paris Review - Interviews
PDF downloads of interviews with many people, primarily authors, all having been run in various past issues of The Paris Review.
July 15, 1921. Cleon Throckmorton at the easel on the terrace of the Krazy Kat, an establishment described by the Washington Post two years earlier as ‘something like a Greenwich Village coffehouse.’
As Van Meegeren produced more and more Vermeers, there were more and more Van Meegeren Vermeers to “authenticate” the new ones that came on the market. […] Forgeries used to authenticate other forgeries by the same forger, and in the case of Van Meegeren, forgeries that helped increase the sale price of later forgeries in the same style.
—from the article entitled ‘Bamboozling Ourselves’ by Errol Morris concerning art forger Han van Meegeren
‘Voids is a retrospective of empty exhibitions since that of Yves Klein in 1958. In almost a dozen rooms of the National Museum of Modern Art, it assembles in a totally original manner exhibitions that showed absolutely nothing, leaving empty the space for which they were designed.’
I saw this retrospective in Paris. I nearly died.
Another assistant [to Damien Hirst], who prefers to remain anonymous, says she resented being paid £600 to do a painting that would sell for £600,000, and that in an act of rebellion, she imbued the Spot paintings she did with a secret signature that not even Hirst picked up. Yet another tells how when she left, she asked Hirst for one of the Spot paintings and he bluntly told her: ‘Make one of your own.’ When she said: ‘No, I want one of yours’, he replied: ‘The only difference between one painted by you and one of mine is the money.’
—from an article entitled ‘Inside Damien Hirst’s factory’ from the Evening Standard
