Zombie painting designed to satisfy a dying market, and a quest for identity and equality that calcifies into cultural tribalism, will have no place in the hard future.
Michael Bise
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What does it mean for an artist to be simultaneously unnecessary and exploited?
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The human linguistic system and the sensory-motor systems used to construct art objects have been inseparable in the human being since the Great Leap Forward.
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Most artists move through obsessive cycles in which we wrap our thoughts too tightly around an idea and suddenly find ourselves in a place we never intended to go and might not mean to stay.
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The terror and joy on a baby’s face when he experiences something for the first time is what artists crave.
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Young artists have been born into a cultural graveyard overrun with specters from the field of its past.
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Artists who live along the poisoned waters of the Gulf of Mexico have developed a unique relationship with a landscape that demands the ability to live within the cognitive dissonance between idealism and nihilism.
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The rapid loss of a thousand years of collectively acquired manual dexterity causes the drawing student to experience existential panic when he picks up a piece of charred wood and stands before a skeleton and a sheet of paper.
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EssayOp Ed
Crossing Benjamin’s Border: Rereading “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
by Michael Biseby Michael BiseAs artists and writers, when we type in our usernames and passwords and enter into the near-mythic reproducibility of social media, we must never forget that our job is to remain rigorously critical in the face of distraction.
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Bill has set before me a last terrifying example and challenge: to overcome my rage and fear and to someday die with as much grace and dignity as he did.
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At that moment, I understood through an experience what I’ve known intellectually for a long time; the greatest strength of American capitalism lies in its ability to steal and neutralize the authentic, local culture and art of the enslaved, the poor, and the dissatisfied.
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Everyone accepts the rules once they enter the castle. If you've gotten past any of the gates consider yourself a good politician or a lucky fool but not necessarily a real artist because there are millions more with their massive egos bruised, their outlooks bitter, in millions of art worlds.
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America is over, and the last stand of our compromised, imperial American identity is being staged here at the bottom of the nation.
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"Art that cannot rely on the joyous, heartfelt assent of the broad and healthy mass of the people, but depends on tiny cliques that are self-interested and blasé by turns, is intolerable."
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What was it about Wols and this brief, vague period in art history that gave me the impression I was looking at religious icons?