E.O. Wilson

Jonah Lehrer

Atlantic

“Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration… shining down from the heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continually good, mediocre, or bad things, but his judgement, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering. ”

Quoted in Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, 2012

“The Artist’s sense of truth. Regarding truths, the artist has a weaker morality than the thinker. He definitely does not want to be deprived of the splendid and profound interpretations of life, and he resists sober simple methods and results. Apparently he fights for the higher dignity and significance of man; in truth, he does not want to give us the most fantastical, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense of the symbolic, the overestimation of the person, the faith in some miraculous element in the genius. Thus he considers the continued existence of his kind of creation more important than scientific devotion to the truth in every form, however plain. ”

Quoted in Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence, 2011

Reference

Reference

Ny Times

North America is projected to grow at a much slower rate between now and 2050 – with the U.S. population rising from 303.9 million to 395 million.

While the world’s 20 mega-cities get a lot of attention, more than half of the urban world lives in cities of less 500,000 population.

Reference

Logically speaking, then, “mainstream art” (or art tout court?) should be made by sane people; trained and professional people; socially successful people; mainstream art is art that has been art since the moment of its conception; un-intuitive art, that is, art made with well-grounded knowledge of what art is supposed to be; art that is defined as art by its maker (an insider).

No wonder then, that the truth about art might sound like: radical artists profoundly mistrust the ideology of art.“

e-flux

“…of the 820 paintings in his care at the time, only 50 per cent were destroyed or stolen. The artist Asefi was later awarded the Order of the Star medal for his efforts in protecting the paintings of the National Art Gallery in this way.”

The Rosenhan experiment was conducted in two parts. The first part involved “pseudopatients” (three women and five men) who briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in order to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in five different states in various locations in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had not experienced any more hallucinations. Hospital staff failed to detect a single pseudopatient, and instead believed that all of the pseudopatients exhibited symptoms of ongoing mental illness. Several were confined for months. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release. Length of hospitalization ranged from 7 to 52 days, with an average of 19 days.

The second part involved an offended hospital challenging Rosenhan to send pseudopatients to its facility, whom its staff would then detect. Rosenhan agreed and in the following weeks out of 193 new patients the staff identified 41 as potential pseudopatients, with 19 of these receiving suspicion from at least 1 psychiatrist and 1 other staff member. In fact Rosenhan had sent no-one to the hospital.

The study concluded, “It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals” and also illustrated the dangers of dehumanization and labeling in psychiatric institutions. It suggested that the use of community mental health facilities which concentrated on specific problems and behaviors rather than psychiatric labels might be a solution and recommended education to make psychiatric workers more aware of the social psychology of their facilities.

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The Independent

In February of 1968, Robert Crumb loaded a baby carriage with Zap Comix #1. He and his wife Dana, strolled down Haight street selling copies for 25 cents each. That was the year that “underground comix” began to “solidify as a viable enterprise in the Bay Area.” Crumb’s work has an anachronistic style, as if “an old-time newspaper cartoonist from 1908 had suddenly stepped out of a time machine and begun smoking dope and drawing hippies.” JK

I’m not primarily interested in exhibition making. I operate from the position that standardized exhibitions are an exhausted format, and that audiences are either oblivious to the narratives that curators propose, or that they are over-influenced by them and see groupings of artworks not as individual voices in proximity, but as singing the same song. Some would call this a lack of confidence in the viewer (who might be reconsidered as an active participant/producer in the attention economy), or say that I’ve just seen too many mediocre exhibitions, both of which are true. Ultimately I find it more productive to start from a position of not-exhibitions and only move in that direction when necessary.

http://www.pcah.us/

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