ars longa odds

A bad wager to put it all on art over life.

age overturned

The movement to free verse at start of the twentieth century, the turning away from regular meters and rhyme schemes, was much like the great shift in painting that occurred in the late 1200s in Italy. Driven by Cimabue and then Giotto, it brought naturalism into painting that too long had relied on the formulas that make early paintings look stilted and unreal to modern eyes.

innovative v. novel

Is the work innovative, an improvement of the art, or merely novel, different in a way that makes little difference to the art?

counter productive

Your hype is not helping your art.

mere description

I have always thought it was worth paying attention to actions or qualities routinely dismissed as mere when they appear in writing about art, literature, the world. Mere description, for instance, is in reality the most vexing thing to attempt when faced with any form of art, let alone aspect of reality.

—Brian Dillon, “Essay on Affinity II,” Affinities: On Art and Fascination (New York Review of Books, 2023)

not wrong about suffering

After walking through dozens of grand galleries in a major European museum, in my mind arose a different sense to Auden’s line, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters.”

one and done

There is art you are grateful to have experienced but wouldn’t want to own. There are poems you’re grateful to have read but wouldn’t read again.

art and money

To make money by one’s art should be nothing more than a delightful and unexpected convergence. Like running into an old friend someplace you never could have imagined.

bias in us

Just as we have unconscious/implicit bias in social settings, we also must own them when we’re confronted with works of art. No critic is without them.

numbers game

Often the author’s bio will tout how many books published as if that counted when it comes to art.

bad fit

In art, it takes courage to be incongruous.

too much order

There is something about too close attention to metrics that tilts to science and away from art.

size that doesn't matter

Monumentality impresses too easily. Take a few steps back to consider whether the impact is real or initial intimidation due to scale.

first and last art

His art never shifted or changed in any significant way. He continued to produce variations of his original vision.

some go this way, some the other

A fork in one’s life: religion or art.

general or particular

What has reasoning to do with Art or Painting?

The difference between a bad Artist and a Good One Is: The Bad Artist Seems to copy a Great deal. The Good One Really does copy a Great deal.

To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is Alone Distinction of Merit.

—William Blake, annotations to Sir Joshua Reynold’s Discourses.

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From May to September, 1809, Blake held an exhibition of his works at the house of his brother James on Broad Street. He had advertised it with the motto, “Fit audience find tho’ few.” The catalogue was included in the half-crown admission. This exhibition was Blake’s “one great effort to secure recognition as a representative of imaginative art,” and it ended in comparative failure.

Artists on Art: From the XIV to the XX Century (Pantheon Books, 1945), edited by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves

exposed and open

In order to understand art, one must be exposed to art in as many of its manifestations as possible, and then one must be open to those varied experiences, in order to develop a true and abiding feeling for art.

melting into wall

The fate of the painting was, over time and by inattention, to become part of the wall upon which it was hung.

perfectly useless concentration

What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

[Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Anne Stevenson]

One Art: Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, selected and edited by Robert Giroux (FSG, 1995)

amateur maker

Bless and pity the amateurs in art and in poetry. So moved they are by art, they want to try to make it.