One more on Rauschenberg

Tyler Green's blog Modern Art Notes is a great and sometimes contentious journey through the modern art scene.

A recent post discussed the many articles and remembrances of Robert Rauschenberg following his death. Tyler notes the unwillingness of the vast majority of these odes to address RR's homosexuality.


Photo source Modern Art Notes

He leads with:

As I read through the news coverage of Robert Rauschenberg's death last week, I noticed a disturbing sameness: Most writers and critics refused to say that Rauschenberg was gay, and all but two critics were unwilling to say why that is important. This is a problem for two reasons: Rauschenberg's frequently referenced his homosexuality in groundbreaking ways in his own work (much of which was autobiographical and even more of which was intensely about the then-immediate present), and because history tends to hetero-wash whenever possible, to ignore or deny homosexuality when it's convenient.

We are much to willing to sweep under the rug race, class, sexual preference and other things that we let divide us.

Arts blogs and resources

Here a few art blogs that are fairly interesting. The bloggers were all interviewed for a recent issue of Art in America.

Art blog mostly about Philly but still of general interest
Tyler Green's blog about modern and contemporary art
A Portland, OR based blog
And a Seattle-based blog

Finally an artists website called DeviantART mentioned on CNet

I'm not totally sure what DeviantART actually does for an artist but it is worth a look at least.

Steve Martin on why he stuck with comedy

From an article Steve wrote for the New Yorker fairly recently.

Something new

Supposedly I started this blog 2 years ago to track my journey into art. So far that has largely meant just posting my pictures. Is that all there is to my journey? I hope not. So something new. I'm going to post on what I think about art, where it comes from, my fears, etc. I'll also try to talk about some interesting art resources, blogs and stuff that you might want to look at.

Here goes...

Becca gave me a book last year Art & Fear by Bayles and Orland. Somehow Becca seemed to know how much fear rules my life (Her and my therapist. Hey, I'm working on it at least.) It is a wonderful book for all of us who discover that an artist lives somewhere inside. A quote from the last paragraph:

In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice...between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot -- and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.

Controversy

So it happened...complaints about some of my pieces -- sex, drugs and rock n' roll.

Actually it's only the sex. The Carrboro arts committee is very supportive and I hope everything stays up. I don't want to cause problems for the committee or the town of Carrboro because they have been great to me. But, damn it, I have Cheney as a Medusa f*&^ing a skeleton for a reason and that reason being that they (this administration) are the ones who are obscene. My little protest pales compared to the evil they have foisted on the world.

Stay tuned....