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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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The Responsibility of the Artist

A small gem of a book that artists should have on their shelves is Jacques Maritain’s The Responsibility of the Artist. Together with Jacques Barzun’s The Use and Abuse of Art, it is all anyone needs to think or talk about the artist’s ultimate purpose. Dover keeps Barzun in print. Sadly, it does not do […]

Being an Artist vs. Making Art

BEING AN ARTIST AND MAKING ART are not the same. One is self-conscious, the other is directed outward, as Jacques Maritain observed, to the good of the work—to the perfection of the work of one’s hand (if you are a visual artist) in its service to the eye and a cultivated sensibility. The first is […]

Not Failed, Just Unrealized

BEING AN ARTIST MEANS you never have to say, “I failed.” Think of the advantage that gives artists over the rest of the plodding classes. Artists never have to admit the lack of wit, talent, or stamina needed to conceive of work, realize it and see it through. All they have to do is rummage […]

Art, Still Not Dead!

I CANNOT TELL A LIE, much as I would like to. This wonderful bit of Photoshopping was sent by a reader who calls himself Mr. Eyeballs. I wish I could say I found it myself. // // Who knew just how contemporary that Mona Lisa smile could be? A stylized expression in Leonardo’s day, it […]

Disposable=Sustainable

IN CASE ANY OF YOU WONDERED WHETHER SUSTAINABILITY was, at heart, an ideological love affair with subsistence living, take a gander: / // Take this as a fashion forecast of our new footgear when the sustainable crowd finally erases the Industrial Revolution and its works from the planet. The shoes on the left are a […]

More on the Pointing Finger

READER SAM’S REFERENCE, in a comment on the previous post, to the biblical story of Adam naming the animals lends thrust to Tallis’ argument on—for lack of a better term—the metaphysics of pointing. // The Genesis narrative distills into a simple, vivid anecdote the substanceN of Raymond Tallis’ thesis in Michelangelo’s Finger. The mythical Adam […]

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