Why Write

So when I went to the preview opening of the Cardiff & Bures exhibit I somehow managed to sneak in along with the press. And I hung out with press-like members huddled in confused corners of free booze and snacks. I don't consider myself "press" really. I don't think the way I approach my blog is to criticize or convey a non-objective view of a thing or event…At one point a journalist turned to me and, in reference to the art, said "Well, I don't think I like this." And, at that moment I had a stark realization as to my own writing.

I don't think I have ever really approached writing, or anything for that matter, from one particular point. I tend to see everything as an extension of everything else (a fact that seems to be detrimental as I try to explain my varied career path to HR specialists in offices across the country!). I cannot look at a work of art and strictly see it in terms of an art historic cultural legacy or to simply (un-constructively) criticize it. When I look at art I try to see it from the multi faceted ways I personally can- a viewpoint that is subjective to my background of course but that I actively try to push outside of a narrow frame of vision or one particular field.  I want to see the innovation and conceptual construction. I want to appreciate and evaluate the ideas that a single person, or a group of people, feel so strongly about to put into the world to share with others. I want to see science, technology, beauty and meaning.

Hanging out with a group of arts writers made me nervous about the field of arts writing. Not that one has to create art in order to necessarily understand the position of the artist (not to mention grasp the countless areas of fabrication, the personal fears of exposing your innermost soley-self-driven creations to a judgmental audience, the physical work/thought/uneasiness that goes into the making of art…) but I do think there is something to be said for the strange voices and scales we are using to balance the usefulness, importance and understanding of the field nowadays- a narrow glut of insular opinions in an ever expanding media sea. Not to say I am not somehow a part of this as I blog here on the open waves of very personal internet musings, or that I am free of guilt when it comes to a narrow mindedness/misunderstanding towards certain work, but I do think that a more expansive scope needs to be happening not only in arts journalism but in all journalism- and possibly in other fields as well (art about art? gross!). All fields of interest are just extensions of other things, other fields of interest, and the connections and rounded understandings we should be cultivating in the realm of criticism would make the world just a wee bit better I think (or at least make for better conversations in the press circle of art events)! Either way...I am going to keep looking at stuff, and writing about stuff, and live my life in whatever way it turns bringing these turns not into focus but into a map of the complexities, overlays and intricacies that really do make up the world....sigh....

Here is a pic of a New York dock goat leftover (abandoned?) from the Boatel project and a picture of the Jacob Riis Park out in the Far Rockaways...a nice melancholy summers day.