Essay

This week's column is a podcast of me urging you to watch Bruce Conner's 1966 experimental short film Breakway.

Generation X has been showing its age for a while now. This manifests, predictably, with a “kids these days” attitude towards Millennials.

Young artists have been born into a cultural graveyard overrun with specters from the field of its past.

A newly restored program of rarely seen short films gives a glimpse of Austin's DIY rennaisance in the late-'70s and early-'80s.

The gorilla is perfect for receiving projected emotions and expectations from anyone: comedy, sadness, contemplation, trauma, loneliness, the moment of entering self-consciousness.

It took a few years before Facebook started to become creepy for me.

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.

Nowadays showing one’s real ambition—sincere, grand ambiton—is a terrifying proposition.

These are all, for me, very listenable songs, and perhaps ideal for a car trip or flight on your way to a museum show or art-friendly city, or a wander through a museum or gallery.

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.

Houston is pregnant with possibilities. Why aren’t our universities capitalizing on them?

Five years ago, seven years ago, some of us were trying to persuade artists in other more expensive places to move to Texas because it was affordable. But I can’t say that to people in good faith anymore.

We should all just relax, lie back, and enjoy our enrichmutainment.

In 1897, Oofty wolfed down an entire quail in one sitting each night for 30 days, finishing off each bird by downing eight glasses of beer using a spoon and smoking a cigar in less than six minutes.

No one would have played along if Duchamp pointed at the urinal in situ and said it was art.

Ed. note: In recognition of International Women's Day and the Day Without Women Strike, Glasstire re-posts this popular archived essay by one of Houston's most respected artists, who also happens to be a mother.

When does a young adult’s anti-intellectualism morph into something that it smells more like cynical political maneuvering?

As 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.

To non-creative people, this must look nuts.

I attended a new writers’ conference in Minneapolis over the weekend, hosted by the Walker Art Center. It was called “Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age.”