Observe Closely: Mellon Lecture

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Mellon Lecture

I enjoyed the first of this year's Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, given by Professor Mary Miller, from Yale's Department of the History of Art.

Her series title: Art and Representation in the Ancient New World. Her topic today: The Shifting Now of the Pre-Columbian Past. She is a very dynamic teacher, very passionate about her field. A joy to listen to!

Makes me want to go back to Dumbarton Oaks and take a closer look at the Pre-Columbian treasures there. (See also Mesoweb and FAMSI-Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies.)

I love living here, damnit. The whole city is full of treasures. (BTW, image above is from the Dresden Codex.)

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One-Timer Archive

An artist cannot fail. It is a success just to be one.

Charles Cooley

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I have not lost faith. I'm not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven't lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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There may be a great fire in your soul, but no one ever comes to warm himself by it. All that passers-by can see is a little smoke coming out of the chimney and they walk on.
Vincent van Gogh
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If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Yogi Berra
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If it looks like a greeting card, you've gone in the wrong direction.
Leslie Nolan
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I had a little massage, change of clothes. Had a chicken salad. And then tied it up. It was well written.
Jayson Werth
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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein
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He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, on -- wait for it -- Leonardo da Vinci
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All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
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I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
William Faulkner
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Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
Groucho Marx
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Unless if you can afford it, my advice is not to spend beyond your means.
A.A. White
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I don’t care how hard you work, you’ll never open a can of beans with a banana.
Jim Schoenfeld
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One can never know for sure what a deserted area looks like.
George Carlin
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What do Drawing Singing Dancing Music Making Handwriting Playing Story writing Acting Remembering and even Dreaming all have in common? They come about when a certain person in a certain place in a certain time arranges certain uncertainties into certain form.
Lynda Barry in 'What It Is'
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Of course, one never knows what's going to come out, but as soon as the drawing gets underway, a story or an idea is born, and that's it. I spend hour after hour while I draw, observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they're up to, basically, it's my way of writing fiction.
Pablo Picasso (in Roberto Otero, Forever Picasso: An Intimate Look at his Last Years, New York, 1974, p. 170)
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The palest ink is better than the best memory.
Chinese proverb
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Don't go skydiving with the least expensive parachute you can buy.
Anonymous
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I’m a little taken aback by anyone calling himself an artist because of my feeling that that’s the kind of designation that other people should give. You can be an artist in any field, but getting a degree to call yourself an artist would be like getting a diploma to call yourself a genius. If your work is good enough, it can be art, but art isn’t a product. It’s a quality. Sometimes that’s lost sight of. Quality can be in anything.
Charles Eames
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Nothing is fun until you're good at it.
Amy Chua
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I was screened a bit, but it was far out. I should have had a better look at it. I just kind of lost it a sea of red there . . . because we’re not used to playing in a building like that.
Martin Brodeur
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But the point yet remains that the means to the end are just that. Art (and life) may be about the journey, but if the endpoint doesn't grab someone's attention, they aren't likely to ask you how you did it.
Ramie Leigh
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It seems to me that today if you want to produce art seriously and make for yourself a little corner of originality, or at least keep for yourself a thoroughly guiltless personality, you must immerse yourself in solitude. There is too much tittle-tattle. [Il y a trop de cancans.] It's as if pictures were being painted by stock exchange players, by friction from people avid for profits. Apparently you are supposed to rely on the mind and the ideas of your neighbor in order to do anything at all, much as a businessman requires the capital of other people in order to earn a sou. All these transactions put your mind on edge and falsify your judgment.
The 22-year-old Ed Degas, Notebooks, 1856
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I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.
Piet Mondrian
Wait. What? Well, um, yeah.
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You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
Woody Allen
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It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it.
Sam Levenson
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It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.
Ben Shahn
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When I run out of red, I use blue.
Attributed to Pablo Picasso
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I like to do something that I don’t exactly know how to do. I don’t like to do things that I know I can do. If I take a certain approach to certain paintings, when I finish the problem, I don’t have to go on with it. I’m more interested in finding what else I can do that’s more of a challenge for me.
Robert Ryman
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The moment you know how to do certain things, you should by rights stop doing them. You would be ceasing to search and starting to perform. You would become your own expert, and your art will become an exercise in self-congratulation.
Wolf Kahn
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. . . when the irresistible force meets the immovable object, chances are the immovable object is going to come out on top more times than not.
Lumpy
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Unlike artifacts such as bows and arrows, language was not designed by people; people evolved so as to be able to have it, just as bats evolved so as to be able to echolocate and elephants evolved so as to be able to pick things up with their noses.
Ray Jackendoff, Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Evolution (2002)
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He felt so lonely in this desert that sometimes he would walk backwards just to see tracks in front of him. Il se senait seul dans ce désert que parfois il marchait à reculons pour voir quelques traces devant lui.
Hortense Vlou
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A pleasant surprise is in store for you.
Fortune Cookie
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There is no pride in saying out loud: Me too, I'm a painter! Pride consists in saying softly to others: You neither, you aren't a painter.
Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991)
(Rancière, for Dummies, by Ben Davis, 2006, if it's any help)
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Drawing is the activity of organizing [a piece of art] with line. A drawing starts with unordered blank paper. As each line is added the paper becomes more organized, until a final state of order is achieved and the drawing is complete.
Doug Dawson
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The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man's determination.
Tommy Lasorda
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Wander a whole summer if you can. Thousands of God's blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted.
John Muir
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In my opinion, he has already jumped higher than his head.
Ovie on King Henry
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You can't, when you lose a game in a seven-game series, sit and drag your chin down on the ground.
Bruce Boudreau
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There's three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the cold, hard truth.
Don Henley
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My plans are still in embryo. In case you've never been there, this is a small town on the outskirts of wishful thinking.
Groucho Marx (letter 5Dec1945)
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Bonus Groucho quote: "Did you ever notice that Peter O'Toole has a double-phallic name?"
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In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
Yogi Berra
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I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
President Barack Obama 20Jan09
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Make peace with not knowing.
Lisa Semerad 11Jan09
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If I have to, I can do anything.
Ray Burton and Helen Reddy
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Не Боги горшки обжигают. (It's not the Gods who roast the pots.)
Simeon Varlamov 16Dec08
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. . . it is back to the ironing board or drawing board or whatever it is called.
Bruce Boudreau 26Nov08
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Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
George Carlin
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Well, you know what they say about those who keep their heads while all those around them are losing theirs: They don't understand the situation.
Bob Smizik
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You can't depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain
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Some things have to be believed to be seen.
Ralph Hodgson
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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
Paul Valéry

Driftings in and out of the crowd

✱ The SKETCH HUNTER has delightful days of drifting about among people, in and out of the city, going anywhere, everywhere, stopping as long as he likes – no need to reach any point, moving in any direction following the call of interests. He moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook, a box of oils with a few small panels, the fit of his pocket, or on his drawing pad. Like any hunter he hits or misses. He is looking for what he loves, he tries to capture it. It’s found anywhere, everywhere. Those who are not hunters do not see these things. The hunter is learning to see and to understand – to enjoy. [from The Art Spirit by Robert Henri. 1923]

Le Flânerie

✱ "The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird's, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes. The lover of life makes the whole world into his family,… just as the picture-lover lives in an enchanted world of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life moves into the crowd as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity. He, the lover of life, may also be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd: to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every one of its movements presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all the elements that go to compose life. It is an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting." [from ‘The Painter in Modern Life’, Charles Baudelaire. 1863]

✱ See also: Flâneur in Wikipedia