Jerry Saltz’s Open Letter to the Republicans of the 111th Congress -- Vulture

Speaking up for the arts!

Dear Messrs. Kantor and Boehner:

Given your censoring of David Wojnarowicz’s video of ants crawling on a plastic crucifix with a wooden human figure meant to represent Jesus Christ, a literary character penned by numerous authors over several hundred years and now worshiped as God, and your threatening the Smithsonian’s funding if it did not comply with your wishes, I would like you to know about a similar threat to decency.

David Foster Wallace's Personal Files - Newsweek

The well-read DFW:

The archive also corrects Wallace’s reputation as one of the most abstruse of writers. Wallace’s notes to himself in Tolstoy’s essay “What Is Art?” strip back layers of received critical opinion and show a writer who is eager, above all, to connect. When Tolstoy throws down his decisive thunderbolt against art for aesthetics’ sake—“it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based”—Wallace underlines it emphatically, adding “Art as Empathy” in the margin (while the 9-year-old nods, somewhere, inside).

Orson Welles On Art And Work | The New Republic

Orson Welles in 1960 on his political convictions, and forgotten battles between liberals like himself and rightists.

What explains the ascendance of Homo sapiens? Start by looking at our pets - The Boston Globe

This argument seems to put the cart before the horse, so to speak:

The centrality of animals in that early artwork has long intrigued anthropologists. Some have suggested that the animals were icons in early religions, or visions from mystical trances. Shipman, however, argues that the paintings serve a more straightforward function: conveying data between members of a species that was growing increasingly adept at hunting and controlling other animals. Lascaux, in this reading, was basically primitive Powerpoint. The paintings, Shipman points out, are packed with very specific information about animal appearance and behavior.

The important thing is not what the paintings depict, but the fact that there are paintings at all. The fact that we could use our imaginations to organize ourselves around activities like hunting and later agriculture.

Andy Warhol | HiLobrow

What does art look like when it becomes philosophy? -- I like the question better than the answer. Yes, it's Andy Warhol's world, but I don't think he was interested in philosophy. His uniqueness comes from his willingness to play at art in reverse; to attach the inauthenticity of the commercial image to the energizing capacity of the artist.

If advertising isolates us as consumers, Warhol's blankness arrests desire and inspires participation.

Penn and Teller interview - Telegraph

A nice interview:

“Doing beautiful things is its own reward,” [Teller] says, when I ask what enjoyment he can still derive from a trick he has pulled off many thousands of times before. “If you do something that you’re proud of, that someone else understands, that is a thing of beauty that wasn’t there before – you can’t beat that.” He gulps suddenly, like a snake trying to swallow an egg, and when he speaks again his voice has a wobble to it.

“There is that great line in Sunday in the Park with George,” he says, referring to Stephen Sondheim’s 1984 musical about Georges Seurat, “ 'Look, I made a hat where there never was a hat’.” He falls silent again and, as unexpectedly as those coins turn to fish, big fat tears start rolling down his cheeks. “I can’t say that line without choking up, because it states, in profoundly poetic terms, what I have always wanted to do with my life. It’s so simple and so funny, but boy it hits me deep.”

The Hidden God | The New Republic

Struggling with the lack of Authority in Shakespeare's Authorship:

Stephen Greenblatt explained the root irony of the controversy in his Shakespearean Negotiations: Shakespeare’s plays brim with such intensity that it is difficult not to conflate their vitality with traces of the author’s vitality. But of course, as works of art, the plays were written “in full awareness of the absence of the life they contrive to represent.” That is, the plays are imbued with their own life precisely because a playwright knows their life will surpass his own. Even the retreat to “the text itself”—the rallying cry of all undergraduate English classes—is a similar fallacy: “The great attraction of [the text itself],” Greenblatt writes, “is that it appears to bind and fix the energies we prize, to identify a stable and permanent source of literary power, to offer an escape from shared contingency. This project, endlessly repeated, repeatedly fails for one reason: there is no escape from contingency.” Even for Shakespeare.

Keep a Good Head and Always Carry a Lightbulb

The best art is not meaningless, but it revels in ambiguities, loops, sudden drops, and nonsense. Deadly serious, but with stupid jokes.