I am currently reading Lets See, Writing from the New Yorker by Peter Schjeldahl. I met Mr. Schjeldahl as a graduate student in New Mexico. He did a studio visit with me and the dope of a graduate student after my studio visit, did not show up, so Mr. Schjeldahl and I hung out and talked for perhaps an hour and a half about this and that. He is, as you can imagine, a very interesting man.
A few quotes that I appreciate so far from Lets See:
"Critics, like sports writers, inform and flavor impassioned conversations. Meanwhile, there remains at least one nice difference between art and baseball: in art, none of the players knows for sure what the game is. I enjoy pointing this out." (P. 11) From the Introduction: twenty Questions
"Americanness is nobodiness. Deep down, I feel like a nobody; and this void in me is the ernest of my belonging. A hole is my heart pledges allegiance to America." (P. 14) America
"Each of these works brought in me, if only mildly, the simultaneous physical reaction and mental arousal that are beauty's hormonal signature." (P.18) Beauty
"Beauty isn't beauty if it doesn't inspire awe for a specific proposition about reality. Beauty makes a case for the sacredness of something-winning the case suddenly and irrationally. It is always to late to argue with beauty." (P.18) Beauty
"Most political art is poor art and worse politics. Art is both too sensitive and too ponderous for the necessary roughness and speed of civic conflict." (P. 42) Dead End Kids: Political Art
"Cage, the sunny guru of silences and random sounds, endorsed chance as liberating and fun. Nauman gives us the bad news: chance is the universe's way of telling us that we reason and desire in vain. " (P. 118) Bruce Nauman
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