Martin Kemp examing an alleged Jackson Pollock; Photo: Steve Pyke (The New Yorker)
Martin Kemp’s daily work involves a magnifying glass, an archive of art books, a nimble memory, and a keen eye. As one of the world’s leading art authenticators he has transformed works that were once thought to be worth pennies into objects that now have the value of small 3rd world countries. The methods by which he arrives at his conclusions are often the object of both praise and ridicule. To hear Kemp articulate what it’s like to come into the presence of an authentic work by a Renaissance master bears all the imprint of a connoisseur in thrall to his subjective vision.
Here’s the funny thing about the illustrated Youtube lecture series “RSA Animate” (put together by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA)): Several of its best lectures address how understanding the cognitive nuances of the human brain can help us achieve gains in social progress. At the same time, the animated lectures are themselves delightfully successful at piquing the brain with movement, shape, text, and sound – and with the simplest of technologies: a marker, a whiteboard, an arm. Most impressively, the lectures manage to engage the viewer’s attention without compromising the sophistication of their content. Watching clip after clip, I feel like a caveman held rapt by the flickering light of the fire. A caveman learning about deliberative democracy.
In his annotations to Pound’s Cantos, Robert Anton Wilson writes that Ezra was privy to a “stoned perception” by an everyday practice of pranayama and “40 some years meditatin’ on Chinese ideograms like a cloud over falling rain over dancing shaman.” He writes this between these lines of Canto XX:
With noise of sea over shingle,
Striking with:
hah hah aha thmm thumb, ah
woh woh araha thumm, bhaaa.
And from the floating bodies, the incense
blue-pale, purple above them,
Shelf of the lotophagoi,
Aerial, cut in the aether.
Wilson writes that “Ez” wasn’t “stoned on dope” like “Baud”[elaire] but nonetheless knew of artificial paradises and their ensuing agony enough to produce lines like the above. Wilson suggests that, having achieved these levels of consciousness with his own poetic-meditative practice, Pound’s stoned consciousness comes off in the poems as a kind of spiritual sensibility — usually represented as a global syncretism of the arts. And this, Wilson argues, led to the consciousness of the “global village” in Pound’s poetry. But, of course, Wilson himself reached the global consciousness by the ways of “Baud.” So what did these thinkers share that transcended the means (drugs or no drugs) and got them likewise to an elevated understanding of global community? [Read More]
This month, transit police officer Johannes Mehserle stood trial for killing 22-year old Oscar Grant by shooting him in the back while he lay unarmed, restrained, and prone on the floor. Grant was black; Mehserle is white. Mehserle was charged with second degree murder, but it was widely predicted that he would be convicted only of involuntary manslaughter – as was ultimately the case.
Karen Dalton is making a comeback. She is now included consistently in mixtapes, compilations, artist retrospectives, but so much more is still to be known about her.This is what we do know. Karen Dalton was Bob Dylan’s favorite singer from the Greenwich Village folk revival set. She was half-Cherokee, beautiful, lanky, wore her long, black hair down, obscuring her face. She lost two front teeth while in a fight with two lovers. She played a 12-string guitar and a banjo and supposedly hated recording so much she had to be tricked into it. She lived in a small cabin in the mountains of Colorado and was “living the life” of the real folk artist while other folk-poseurs took the spotlight in her stead. She had troubles with recording executives because of her heavy drug and alcohol use, hot temper, inability to compromise her sound. In some accounts she died on the streets of New York, alone, forgotten, after years of battling AIDS, and in other accounts she was well-cared for by friends, and died peacefully.
When graffiti artist and experimental stop-motion animator Blu claimed his wall-painted video short, MUTO, was just a test for a larger, more thoughtful narrative, I didn’t quite know what to expect. His MUTO project was already decidedly impressive — the Italian (Maybe? The artist’s terrestrial positioning is somewhat cloaked in mystery, just like another iconoclastic vandal from the UK) artist used a camera to make his graffiti evolve in time through a frantic succession of images. Fantastical creatures emerged from floating blobs of paint; they traveled across the city walls and streets in a fluttering movement, and found their end in surprising turns of events.
In “BIG BANG BIG BOOM”, yes all caps, Blu offers his most decisive work thus far. It’s a mythological tale, seemingly lighthearted and playful, but bound together with a strong sense of caution and compassion. It’s a story of our cosmological origins, the evolution of the planet earth, and our likely end, plastered onto the surfaces of city space and then embedded in code onto the digital stratosphere, glowing electric like a Homeric fire pit, where lyrical stories of human folly and inevitable subjection to divine forces are still shared.
Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant in Pittsburgh that serves cuisine only from countries with which the United States is in conflict. The artist-run take-out storefront serves a rotating menu every four months to both highlight and introduce a direct, and non-polemic, understanding of these countries and their rich food cultures.
The Black Eye Galaxy, quilt by Jimmy McBride, 2010
The line that divides the study of astronomy from pure divination is a thinly constructed one. In Europe, the science cut its teeth on heresy and witchcraft trials; in the Americas it was the stuff of priests. Little wonder that in the post-Hubble age of digital imaging and democratized technologies it has taken its place in the toolkit of conceptual artists. It is, at root, the diligent pursuit to see what does not, to the “normal” eye, exist. At the same time, the precise methodology required to track, map, and diagram the paths of astral bodies is grounded in the honing of a repetitive and highly mathematical technique. Which is all to say that the telescopic arts are perfectly situated to provide a mirror upon the artistic process itself — specifically, the tense relationship between conceptual abstraction and “craft.”
In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an influential essay in the Atlantic titled “ Is Google Making us Stupid” ? Since that essay’s publication the use of the Internet and its effect on our brains has become a highly divisive topic which has produced a large spat of journalistic and academic articles in its wake. [Read More]
Sanullim is something of an anomaly in rock history. At a time when vintage rock was dying and new cultural tropes were diversifying the palette of pop music, Sanullim appeared on the margin in a country whose pop music landscape, heavily censored by the authoritarian bureaus of Park Chung-Hee, mainly consisted of traditional trot ballads and dance-pop music. Sanullim’s heavy bass lines, thunderous drums, chromatic fuzz guitar-work, and psych-image lyrics were a revival shock in a system which had gone dormant since the early 60s scene singlehandedly engendered by Korean rock godfather Shin Jung-Hyeon. [Read More]
The abstraction of hiphop – sonically & visually – is a progression other commentators have discussed in relation to instrumental/beats artists like Flying Lotus and the unparalleled Dilla. But what of the lyrical persona in the abstract world? Which is to say, in this constantly expanding kaleidoscope universe, what happens to the MC? [Read More]
If Martin Scorsese had stopped making films after the 90s, he’d still prove an invaluable part of cinema history on the basis of his current film preservation efforts. Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, which works to “help developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures,” has gone a long way in preserving and promoting little seen, almost lost films from a wide range of countries. [Read More]
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. [Read More]
Popular Articles