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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Michael Fried & Caravaggio

DOES MICHAEL FRIED LIKE ART? Anyone who has dragged themselves through his Absorption and Theatricality has to wonder. It is tempting to push the question a bit further and ask just what it is that he sees when he looks at art. Too often, it seems as though he sees only himself and his own position as a disciple of Clement Greenberg. Fried is the celebrity art historian at Johns Hopkins University and director of its Humanities Center. His latest text, The Moment of Caravaggio, is here on my desk. Continue Reading

Confessional Arts

RUMMAGING THROUGH THE HARDCOVER BIN at the local dump recycling center last week, I came across a discarded library copy of Fulton Sheen’s Peace of Soul (1949). It was famous in its day. I stopped to leaf through it, curious to see if it still held up. Or was it a phenomenon of the times, a relic of made-for-television piety? Answer: It is still a terrific book by a gracious, witty scholar with a gift for speaking to non-scholars without condescension or simplifications. Continue Reading

Artists and Eccentricity

WHEN WE TALK OF BOHEMIA, we are referring to a shifting cultural phenomenon that began among the Romantics, came to dissolute bloom in the prosperity of France’s Second Empire and continued, sporadically, through the Twenties and on into the Sixties. From Thomas De Quincey (17-85-1859) to the Beat Generation, thereabouts. But eccentricity has been with us forever. No doubt there were Neanderthals who considered themselves unique and entitled to attentions unearned by their dull, plodding fellows.buy aciphex online https://blackmenheal.org/wp-content/languages/new/aciphex.html no prescription//// Human history is a kaleidoscope of oddities—but do they belong to the nature of artists? Continue Reading

Born Under Saturn

ARTISTS DO LOVE TO THINK OF THEMSELVES as different from everyone else. They are first on line for the latest article, book, monograph or lecture on the problems of the artist’s personality and the mysterious springs of his creative power. They bathe in popular notions of their own otherness and cater to popular illusion like savvy account execs in ad agencies. It is so satisfying to count oneself a member of an exotic tribe that is, and always has been, temperamental, egocentric, neurotic, defiant, anarchistic, unreliable, licentious (that’s the best part), flamboyant, obsessed and all-around incorrigible. Continue Reading

Of Art & Work

I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT ENJOY a look at one example of art-as-social-practice in action. Herewith,  Portland State University’s MFA students exhibit their craft at the Portland Museum, Oregon: //// Here we see the social role of the artist being played out in a community setting. It is a wonderful thing. Their heads all point to the center like the spokes of a wheel. The wheel—mankind’s first truly revolutionary mechanical device. It made possible the Industrial Revolution and the very thing that gets your Prius from one place to another. Continue Reading
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