The Art Instinct
Tags/ Posted by Tony ThomasThe moon cannot be stolen, only borrowed. Tonight, after your shift ends, I tell you about a surprise in the freezer.continue reading this poem
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution, by Dennis Dutton, Oxford University Press 2009. A review by David Maclagan.
William Koch on the Disciples of Ugliness
Tags/ Posted by Mark KerstetterSuppose you are Dick, or any man, smitten with a certain woman.continue reading this poem
In the early half of the eighteen hundreds the French Neo-Classical painter Ingres sneeringly described the younger Romantic painter Delacroix as “a disciple of ugliness”. A century later the French novelist Jean Genet claimed that “Ugliness is Beauty at rest.” Between these two events stretches the Romantic revolution in art.
The Cellular World
Tags/ Posted by Tony ThomasVan Helsing unfastened the coffin lid, peeled the crucifix from the bone-white brow.continue reading this poem
I always enjoyed the story of how Ludwig Wittgenstein, after delivering a four-hour lecture to his class in Cambridge on the intricacies of some logical problem, would then go to a movie in town (his favorite genre was the American Western) and sit in the front row, letting the images inundate his overheated brain.
Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning
Tags/ Posted by Mark KerstetterWhat season is it, Cy, when all the birds get dragged backcontinue reading this poem
Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1955 In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg, a young, little known artist, took a box of erasers and set to rubbing out a densely layered drawing by Willem de Kooning, the king of Abstract Expressionism, and he did it with the Master’s permission. Rauschenberg has said that he was “trying to find a way [...]
