Cut The Chaff. Tighten The View: Three Things Indeed

I. "There's nothing at all wrong with being an artist. Why is that pretentious? People still respect it and feel awe for the talent.... Embrace the identity. I finished The Agony and the Ecstasy last week and was just floored and drained by Michelangelo's commitment to his art... and to himself. My short film is about a girl who discovers herself through painting... Art is a medium for self-discovery and self-creation. Be proud that you have such an outlet..."

- Gary, Friend, 04.08.08


II. "Your March 23 art issue promises both a “redrawing” and a comprehensive look at a place that mystifies and confuses many people. What we are shown is a collection of war horses and their anointed successors and a fetishistic group of pretty-boy workhorses who work low-paying jobs in the hope of getting into a group show.

The audience for this stuff is getting both more affluent and smaller. This world is built on a shaky foundation, namely hedge-fund collectors and the nouveau riche. When it comes crashing down, as it did in the 1980s, what will there be to show for it?

How about focusing on work that tries to communicate honestly and gives the viewer an entry point. Unless big changes are made, the art world will diminish into a smaller and smaller niche."

- David Gitt, Brooklyn
NYT Magazine, Letters
In reference to "Redrawing the Art World," 02.23.08


III. "...O’Hara’s first real accomplishment was his personality, which became famous long before his poems did. But his personality was always a brilliant contrivance, practically a work of art: improvised, self-revising, full of feints. Ashbery recalls Kenneth Koch’s wondering, before either of them met him, “I wonder what it would be like to know O’Hara.” Someone with O’Hara’s presence could afford to regard the writing of poetry as a secondary act, a transcript of personality. Transcripts aren’t generally thought of as art in themselves, which may explain why O’Hara was so reckless with his poems once he got them down on paper, jamming them in his pockets or in random drawers. Who knows how many O’Hara poems have been lost? Reconstructing his opus feels like reconstructing Sappho’s from papyrus scraps."

- Fast Company, The world of Frank O’Hara
by Dan Chiasson
The New Yorker, 04.07.08