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Author Topic: Pulitzer prize winning art critic  (Read 2164 times)

32BT

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Rob C

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Re: Pulitzer prize winning art critic
« Reply #1 on: April 23, 2018, 06:33:08 am »

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/jerry-saltz-pulitzer-prize-1267016

The guy obviously has issues, being married is one of them...

;-)


Based on his Dante stuff, he was wise to quit; he seems to have done well in his alternative path through life.

Far from the wife being a drag, she saved his life with a little truth!

However, I would agree with him on one very important point: people who are artists are so by nature, and they really have no choice. Which is just as well, for thinking that being an artist is going to mean a wonderfully happy and free life is a dream that seldom - if ever - comes true. You at least require the commercial work in order to finanace the personal, should the personal differ fom the commercial, which is not always the case for some fortunates.

Most problems of survival are solved if you are independently wealthy, but that does not solve your personality problems of angst and self-doubt, even if connections can guarantee some public image for you. Fooling yourself is surprisingly hard to do convincingly.

Rob

32BT

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Re: Pulitzer prize winning art critic
« Reply #2 on: April 23, 2018, 07:25:39 am »


Far from the wife being a drag, she saved his life with a little truth!


A little truth? Not sure what you mean by that since i don't think it can (or should) be dosed, but yes, the truth will set you free.

And while i wouldn't want to suggest his marriage is a drag (let alone suggest his wife is a drag), and while i completely agree she opened his eyes, marriage itself is generally considered a straight-jacket, is it not? The kind of straight-jacket thinking that any self respecting artist should try to break free from. Not many will succeed, but those who do can become channels for unrestricted emotions allowing production of pure, truthful expressions, or, in other words, they can become unrestricted channels to the truth. The type of truth that will eventually set us all free. The type of truth we call Art.
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Rob C

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Re: Pulitzer prize winning art critic
« Reply #3 on: April 23, 2018, 09:58:01 am »

A little truth? Not sure what you mean by that since i don't think it can (or should) be dosed, but yes, the truth will set you free.

And while i wouldn't want to suggest his marriage is a drag (let alone suggest his wife is a drag), and while i completely agree she opened his eyes, marriage itself is generally considered a straight-jacket, is it not? The kind of straight-jacket thinking that any self respecting artist should try to break free from. Not many will succeed, but those who do can become channels for unrestricted emotions allowing production of pure, truthful expressions, or, in other words, they can become unrestricted channels to the truth. The type of truth that will eventually set us all free. The type of truth we call Art.

Quite the opposite.

 Re: Five fallacies about art
« Reply #19 on: Today at 09:55:47 AM »

OmerV

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Re: Pulitzer prize winning art critic
« Reply #4 on: April 24, 2018, 08:03:48 pm »


 Fooling yourself is surprisingly hard to do convincingly.

Rob

Not sure about that. There is a great deal of just competent, mediocre work that makes many people, including the artists, happy.  But then, who can tolerate unremitting, unforgiving truth?

Rob C

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Re: Pulitzer prize winning art critic
« Reply #5 on: April 25, 2018, 09:17:18 am »

Not sure about that. There is a great deal of just competent, mediocre work that makes many people, including the artists, happy.  But then, who can tolerate unremitting, unforgiving truth?


That's a good question.

However, fooling the self comes on many levels: from health, love, and through to eternity, we all have to come to some personally calibrated level of certainty about life and our place within it.

Fortunately, we are fallible and that gives us the ability to turn on the force shields whenever the need is too strong to handle. That, though, doesn't imply that they can be kept permanently activated. If only for the purpose of recharging our own batteries, do we open our minds again and face whatever out there that it is that we fear. We simply can't avoid it, and perhaps the easiest illustration is with our own photographs: it's often better to make one and sit on it for a few days (without looking at it again) before showing it. For there's a caveat here: incubate for too long, and with familiarity, everything becomes almost as acceptable as everything else we have done.

(As with a point made in another thread about colour images and their reality, with the passage of time the evidence becomes the fact. A statement that the photographer was the only one who knew what things looked like at the time of exposure is unbelievable: just look at old family snaps you haven't see for a while, and when confronted with images of your mother or anybody else from a long time ago, tell me that the picture is exactly as you remember that person. Of course it's not! Your memory is very unreliable. You will have recalled a person either taller, shorter, fatter or more thin and almost never as within the slice of age that the picture reveals, just like some Dorian Gray truth you forgot to remember.)

So in conclusion, the question you posed has to be answered by stating that nobody can withstand permanent, clear and brutally honest self-appraisal.

Rob
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