Links – shopping for images

From Ms.C, my favorite monster (where high gets low), photo of Muro by Raquel Paiewonsky. C-Monster commentary: “Boobies!” Who says art criticism on blogs is not of the highest order?  #

Click to enlarge. (Previous from me, Breasts at work and play here.) #

Topping the charts (again): Holland Cotter with his review of Light of the Sufis, here. Cotter is where I go to shop for images. #

Two from Sufi review:  A 17th century Indian painting he describes as “an ego reduced by love to an ash on the arm of God.” Nobody with as wide a view of art writes better: #

A Koran page handwritten in light — that is, in gold and silver inks on
a sheet of parchment dyed deep blue — is the exhibition’s oldest work,
dating from the 10th or 11th century. Seen by candlelight, the words,
which describe the rewards of Paradise, would have glinted against the
dark ground like constellations in a night sky. #

Also, Cotter on Giacometti, here: #

These portraits are laborious, noodling things, their lines repeated
over and over as if Giacometti were determined to create something
solid from nothing, then to obliterate that something. Far more relaxed
– and surely Giacometti drew as compulsively as he did to relieve
tension — are the drawings that look incidental, on the fly: an empty
studio interior, apples in front of a window, a pot of tulips, a tree.
Heaviness lifts; anxiety is dispelled. The faint lines of the tree fly
outward and upward like flames, evidence of a lightened-up, fly-away
artist that some part of Giacometti may always have wanted to be. #

Most dutiful plod: Kenneth Baker’s review of Lords of the Samurai. He tells anecdotes from the catalog and calls it a day. #

Also insupportable: Baker’s contention that Ansel Adams tops Georgia O’Keeffe in SF exhibit. No matter what’s on view, this isn’t possible. Baker doesn’t bother to try to prove the impossible either. He just asserts it. What’s happening to one of the best art critics writing inside the dying empire of a newspaper, or, what’s your frequency, Kenneth? Working for a living, taking what you’re given? Your slumber-while-typing depresses. #

Dress up the skin of your life: With infections, here.

Speaking of food and art, Toi Sennhauser is a deeper sea diver. At art festivals, she has served bread baked with her vaginal yeast as starter, here, and made edible candy portraits of her family, here. (Her husband is a stick-to-your-teeth kind of guy, and her mom’s got a sour exterior.) #

Energy in the technicals: Paul Levy gets specific about Howard Hodgkin, here.

Verbal tennis at the Houston Chronicle: Douglas Britt gets it right in a platformed response to The Art Guys, sadly,  here and here. How do I know, since I didn’t see it? That’s the beauty of video documentation, here. If the AG of the 1980s met the AG of today, the former would tell the latter to stop messing with the legacy. #