Friday, January 20, 2012

ok, happy new year...

so much going on-- life, art, love, life, fatherhood, trying to be an artist, etc... what a fine adventure i've stumbled into.

hirst. yeah...

well, he's a whore. a pawn of his own lost, pathetic ambition. a ghost adrift in manufactured "punk" pedigree-- so stupid he doesn't understand that he's one with bad dance music and reality TV shows; bags of potato chips and institutionalized poverty. indeed, he may actually believe that he creates an "art" that is challenging (in a real sense)...
yeah. hirst...

and yes, hirst sucks.

he's just smart enough to exploit the fools and the market and just emasculated enough to think it's cool to do so.... it's so easy. so easy... years ago i understood it was not a difficult agenda to plot a career of "false art"-- an art of parody: the empty space, the ridiculous video, what have you... so easy.

and he will die perhaps believing that he really did something. maybe in his dwarfed way of thinking his oeuvre is a comment.

OF COURSE HE THINKS THIS...

thats where i get caught-- is he part of the joke or just playing the joke?? in the end it doesn't matter. there is nothing there.

the first piece of writing i ever published on art was on hirst. he and i have been odd bedfellows these many years. i was a young drunken, stoned, tangled hair lad in SoHo, finding my way along the cobblestones on Wooster Street- horribly hung over after too long a night of tall drinks and brazilian women.

i wrote, in closing, "art is death, not dead flesh."

and there is no life here.

so there can be no death.

hirst is simply the fat left over from the slaughter
of what was called "post-modernism..."

money and the wretched materialism aside,
it is as if he never belched his foul stench into the void.

his end will be meaningless.
as was his "art"
and his life...

Sunday, January 1, 2012

and now frankenthaler has passed... i've been torn of late trying to piece together my thoughts on her time and her art. i've seen some great pieces and i've seen some real crap and i saw that show at knoedler years ago that was an embarrassment.

helen had a lot of breaks handed her way. you can't deny it or pretend them away... another rich girl out there playing the game-- hook up with the most important critic of the era; marry an established painter, etc... why not?

in the end, i'd say she left more influence then art.

if she gave noland and louis a way out of pollack, she didn't give herself much else...

she blotted and poured and stained away the years and ended up doing poorly wrought landscape-based works that looked like the work of the bankers wife (i think) she was...

it saddens me to think of what she could have done--
how could it go so wrong??

but she did what she did and some of it will stand the test of time.

and as we're told to mourn her,
i'll wonder again to myself
when the pat lipsky retrospective opens...