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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Joseph Haske’s Scrolling Images

I FIRST SAW JOSEPH HASKE’S PAINTING nine years ago at Sears Payton in New York. I have been following his exhibitions ever since. The simplicity of his imagery, conveyed through richly developed surfaces, apppealed to me. Surface quality is, quite possibly, the most difficult aspect of painting. Here was a painter who had husbanded his craft to serve the delicacy of his chosen forms. The loveliest of them allude to natural forms or to the kind of decorative patterning that appears on Buddhist thangkas or in manuscript marginalia. Continue Reading

American Qur’an

IT IS HARD, SOMETIMES, to know whether to cry or curse. Cursing satisfies the soul but a heart-felt expletive is better when it is blurted out loud. It just does not look right in print. A good curse deserves to be said in full, not weakened with bowdlerizing fig leaves: @#$!%!!  Besides, there really are not enough bodily orifices up which Sandow Birk should be advised to stow his Qur’an project. His head. And his promoters’ heads. So I cry instead. Continue Reading

On Labor Day

THIS IS A SOBERING LABOR DAY. We have seen the employment statistics. Somewhere under the rubble of numbers are artists—semi-employed, underemployed—supporting themselves with every imaginable odd job: a part-time adjunctcy here, another there; waiting tables; house painting; dog walking; carpentry—you name it. Yet institutions of so-called higher learning, keep turning out M.F.A. candidates on the false assumption that a faculty position awaits them. Exploiting popular delusion, Texas Tech University trumpets itself as the first to offer a doctorate in fine art.  Continue Reading

Manual Labor in the Age of Academe

PRESENT AN ALIEN FROM OUTER SPACE with an illustrated time line of Western art—from, say, Theodoros of Samos to selected offerings from any museum of contemporary art. Ask the fellow if he can tell which end of the time line is the beginning. [It is not a trick question. We just do not know whether aliens read from left to right or the other way around.] If the frequencies along his optic nerves run as ours do, and if he has his wits about him, he will choose, with confidence, the contemporary stuff as the slime from which Theodore eventually emerged. Continue Reading
poster: what makes an artist

A Reader Asks . . .

IN RESPONSE TO THE EARLIER POST, Art & Money, an astute reader writes to ask:
Perhaps conscientious and knowledgeable critics should try to explain the supply side of this equation, how art is produced to play a role in the continuing cycle.  How does it happen that a woman with no more talent than any teenage girl who draws pictures of rock stars becomes famous, wealthy, and sought by collectors and museums?  Who accomplishes this, and to whose benefit?  Is it for money, or is it that, as O’Brien says in 1984, the purpose of power is power?
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