general

The New York Times on the wrong way and the right way to be a Modernist artist:

Roberta Smith on Kenneth Noland's refusal to change with the times:

In the 1960s, Color Field painting vied for dominance with Pop Art and Minimalism, ultimately losing the contest in terms of both critical stature and market share. Perhaps to his detriment, Mr. Noland was ardently loyal to his formalist principles.

Michael Kimmelman on Pierre Boulez's strength through accommodation:

[Daniel] Barenboim phrased it another way when we talked one recent afternoon: “What makes Pierre a towering modernistic figure is that he has managed in his life to move between revolutionary moments and evolutionary moments. When revolution was necessary, he was there, courageously, to lead it.

“But he is a great strategist. And he doesn’t overestimate himself. He is too intelligent to stick to beliefs or opinions when they are no longer necessary. I remember him coming to my concert in Paris once and being very disparaging about Bruckner. But then, 15 years later, there he was conducting Bruckner himself, not out of weakness but because his thinking evolved.”

Classic NY BS

Bought some winter boots a few years ago at West Side shoe store. Have been taking them back every year so for resoling/heeling.
The owner is nice, Ukrainian according to the Web.
The business went from being a shoe-store-with-repair to repair-only. Then he rented part of the shop to a watch repairman.
Although nice, the owner is hardly ever there and his employees are ball busters.
One of them, who also works the counter, is surly and argumentative. I left the boots with him Monday and asked for new heels and new laces.
He said fine, come back Wednesday, they'll be ready.
Wednesday, neither he nor the owner is there, just an even surlier older man in the back who works on the shoes.
The old man finds my boots, they have new heels but are missing laces. He says "What size you want? 38? 40?"
"I don't know, do you have the old laces so we can measure them?"
"No, here, you try 40."
Thinking 40 is too small I tear off the seal and thread one of the boots. "These are too small, see?" I say.
"You rip the seal, you have to pay for them."
"No I don't, where are my original laces? I'd like them back, they fit fine, just a little worn."
The old man doesn't understand my English so he calls the watch repair guy over to translate.
The watch repairman listens to the old man's tirade, then turns to me and says, "You can't rip the seal and not pay for the laces."
At this point I'm starting to, um, criticize their business practices. The old man gets on a cell phone and calls the owner, telling me he is "five minutes away."
The owner comes in, hands me a pair of 54 inch laces. I say "we had a little miscommunication about the laces."
"It's not the laces," he says, which I assume means his problems have nothing to do with me. That's for sure.

Don't remember the second part of this sentence being in yesterday's draft of Roberta Smith's New York Times notice of Kenneth Noland's death, but could have missed it: "In the 1960s, Color Field painting vied for dominance with Pop Art and Minimalism, ultimately losing the contest in terms of both critical stature and market share."

Smith thus poses art history as a capitalist struggle that Noland lost by remaining "ardently loyal to his formalist principles," as she puts it. Perhaps if he had switched to Pop he would have done better. Still, am not aware that museums took down their Nolands and Morris Louises and Helen Frankenthalers as a result of Color Field "losing the contest"; seems like I've seen Paul Feeley's work at Matthew Marks within the last 10 years.

Noland produced some butt-awful paintings in his later days but news articles aren't usually the place to get into that; as I noted over at Paddy's it read like Smith was getting in one last dig at her hated "formalism" (which official Times Noland obit writer William Grimes somewhat more enthusiastically called "high modernism")--and the artist is dead: there is no reason to harry him into the grave with all this agenda.

(For those just joining us, an entire generation of critics and academics cut its teeth opposing abstract painting advocate Clement Greenberg and the artists he supported after 1960 or so, including Noland. That generation doesn't agree on anything subsequent to that marvelous time of struggle but it's de rigueur to say Clem "lost" in every available forum, including news articles.)

My dog in this hunt: Noland's first decade or so is stunning and I never believed for a minute that it was about some pedantic Josef Albers "make one color look like two" exercise. The paintings are too vibrant and the colors too intuitive to be about teaching anything. It's about pleasure and transport and non-verbal thought, something the later '60s hair shirts can't abide. Still.

Afterthoughts: Color field painting and the minimalist art it inspired are so alike you'd think no one would distinguish them now. Despite the talk of pleasure and transport above, these are still very cool, stylish/stylized objects. The fact that one group of hippies didn't want color and another did is still reverberating now in the obits, an astounding fact. I suspect (but can't prove) what Roberta Smith really meant to say is that Noland's work got bad towards the end, which she ascribes to inflexibility on his part, but that would be too over-the-top so she softened it with the market share and critical stature talk, which she probably also believes. In any case, a death notice in the "paper of record" wasn't the place for the digs. (Writing in progress, sorry for the revisions.)

None of this is meant to be permanent--hence "modular." The main idea is treating the laptop as a hardware effects processor. It's the same idea as the Muse Receptor, having a separate computer act as a "plug in host" to spread the CPU hit around. It's also about integrating analog and digital, live and pre-recorded. The analog sounds have richer harmonics and presence (to my ear anyway) but serve mainly as clay for the digital effects (delays and filters), which add the time element. It took me while to get rid of various hum and latency issues but I'm liking this basic configuration. So many possible combinations.

This reminded me of the music studio diagram I posted in Jan 2005. Many assumptions have changed, several hundred songs later, but this idea of circulation between hardware and software is still appealing to me.

Update, Oct 2014: It's confusing to look back at posts around this time because of my use of the word "modular" to describe this particular set-up. It's modular in the sense of being able to configure effects chains using hardware but it's not true modular in the sense of making sounds from scratch with oscillator, VCA, envelope, filter, etc.

Last night at a New Year's Eve party had the unfortunate "good artists can come from anywhere" argument. Since the person espousing that was too passionate or stubborn to listen, here's the counternarrative:

An artist can be outside a major metro area and be discovered in the near or long term. But if art is dependent on the person as well as the moment, as Matthew Arnold observed, then it stands to reason that the moment will be found (or accelerated) where there is the largest concentration of people who can make it happen. Given how many obstacles an artist faces, why would you handicap yourself being outside that zone if you had an ounce of choice in the matter?

Part of the chemistry of the moment is a shared professional language. Again, an artist doesn't have to speak that language or self-identify with the community that speaks it, but why would the artist choose a mute or deficient community if he or she had any choice?

Afterthought: the Internet helps the geographical hurdles somewhat, but at the end of the day, a painter, say, is not going to be evaluated based on jpegs. Someone is going to have to verify the work--why not the largest possible number of someones?