Whitney Dail spends most of her time daydreaming about space, especially anything sixties Space Age. She rides her bike almost every day, loves researching and staying informed about current issues in contemporary art, enjoys watching road-cycling races (grand tours), and has a vast knowledge of British subcultures. Whitney is currently seeking her masters in Arts Administration at SCAD.
"Instead of awakening us to new possibilities, popular art tranquilizes us; it is our aesthetic valium. Think of the examples I have cited: no matter how skillfully and shrewdly constructed, popular art always offers what we already know, or less. Popular art dumbs us down."
— from “Dumbing Down Art in America” by David Swanger. (Access it on JSTOR). I read this article three times today. Swanger articulates everything I have thought and debated through my journey into Arts Administration. His argument is powerful. I wish I wrote this article!
"The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp — Dandyism in the age of mass culture — makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica."
"Validation is not straightforward. If you are pursuing a career in accountancy, you are confronted with a series of hurdles; clear them all, and you have arrived. For artists, life is much more complicated. In a social setting where the official rule is rule-breaking, the artist who crawls under the first hurdle, knocks over the second and does a strange scissor kick over the third may ultimately win the greatest recognition. Almost by definition, a competent artist is an insignificant one."
— Sarah Thornton for The Economist, How to Make Art History. I encourage all of my artist friends to read this article!
School is back in session today where I resume my 12 hour days of full-time job + class after work + homework all night. The more education, the merrier. One of these days, I’ll stop being a student. At least it isn’t as bad as being Steven Shorter.
The liberal idea that, given enough education, these millions will grow into self-aware, creative human beings is nothing more than an exploded myth. It can never happen.
"The one good thing about space being the same as time is that if you travel to the outer reaches of the universe and the voyage takes three thousand earth years, your friends will be dead when you come back, but you will not need Botox."
— From the short story “Strung Out” by Woody Allen. Read it here.
"At the same time, the very vastness of space acts as a strong discouragement; people complain that they cannot visualize the interstellar or intergalactic scale, and so refuse to investigate the matter further. This is as short-sighted as it is sad. In the first place there is no need to ‘visualize’ the universe in order to gain some idea of its workings—for no astronomer can really comprehend the enormity of his field of study. It is simply a matter of getting used to dealing with very large units of distance. On the Earth we might arbitrarily define 1 foot as a small distance, 1/1,000th of a millimetre as a very small distance. The astronomical equivalents of ‘very small’ and ‘small’ could be 1 mile and 1 light-year (5,880,000,000,000 miles). We can no more imagine 1/1,000th of a millimetre than a million miles—but no one is afraid of looking through a microscope! And at the same time there is no doubt which is the more impressive."
— James Muirden, from Stars & Planets: An Introduction to the Wonders of Modern Astronomy (1964). I found this book at a thrift store this weekend. The style of writing is very much like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.
"The paradox and contradiction that is made apparent by these anecdotes defines much of the art of the last 50 years; art that has found itself by questioning authorship, authenticity and identity. It’s a questioning that ranges across many issues: the authority and meaning of the signature; the use of found source material as copy or theft; the adoption of a strategy of simulation within the conception of the work; a re-questioning in those terms of the status and usefulness of the Duchampian readymade that itself refers directly, through the act of nomination, to the role of the signature; the definition of the copy in terms of the relationship to a primary source that has been lifted to new use, the repetition of such an act, or even the representation of the act of repetition as a form of copy."
— from “‘This is Not By Me’: Andy Warhol and the Question of Authorship” by Andrew Wilson
"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."
