Awareness that to negate the fashionable wares of the present moment is to imply its presence with equal strength: A face-vase problem.
Directed formalisms.
To end that cowardice that presents itself as discretion.
Quitting.
Eliminate that critical position that begins with “that’s nice” and ends at “that’s okay” seemingly without anything to snag on in between.
Large, loose, baggy monsters.
They tell us the desire to coin movements used to be much more competitive. Loose groupings of artists were corralled under some heading they likely didn’t even identify with. “Meaning sticks to man: even when he wants to create non-meaning.” Oh well, history compresses your enemies into your friends — and all the better for it, posterity made them grateful for that -ism when it became prime real estate. Market keywords: zombie formalism, post-internet, black figuration. The relationship between the historical resilience of a movement and the naming of them as such operates on an inverted relationship to how it functioned in the past — a canary in the coal mine.
Constituent power.
Kodak Black’s Painting Pictures.
An understanding of the misplaced gravity onto coyness. There are derivative forms of silence.
Sympathy not with suffering but with thought.
The type of freakishness that vanishes from your life when you went to college.
The type of freaks that vanished from your life when you went to college.
Dread.
Fantasy.
To correct the touchingly naïve conviction amongst younger painters that they must do a busker’s rendition of Vuillard in order to have a career.
Construction over reconstitution.
Development without plot.
Dilation without limit.
Build without correlate.
Chin gripping without shame.
Strolling.
Enjoy its time in bed, enjoy not winning.
Bodies of work that are incomprehensible from what’s preceded them.
Dethronement.
A backdraft of time.
To not articulate why.
An art student told me the other day that you could order stretchers and canvas to your house, and that in the time it took to arrive, you could encode yourself with relevant histories straight from your phone. You don’t even need to go to school anymore, he says. He told me that art was better than it’s ever been, that there was so much of it, and that he’s moving from Rutherford to the city as soon as he can. He plans on sleeping in an artist’s studio he found, he can make it work, that he can shower at the gym. Says he drove two hours to get to the opening, says it’s the traffic, says he likes the art, says you can’t expect to just bump into things like this.