Antología Personal, a collection of short stories and essays by Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro.
P. 79:
Paradis hablaba de esa época mercantilista en la cual para triunfar en el arte era necesario comportarse como un boxeador o como un payaso.
Archive for the 'What I’m Reading' Category
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Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum by Michael Gross.
This dishy page-turner chronicles more than a century’s worth of rich-people scoop and intrigue at the Met (including an entertaining account of how the venerable institution was built upon the private collection of a fake general with a warehouse full of pillaged Cypriot artifacts). I’m still reading the sucker, which checks in at 486 pages, but thus far one of my favorite quotes comes from a museum annual report that details what went down the first day the museum opened its doors to the unclean masses on Sunday in 1889:
Many visitors took the liberty of handling every object within reach; some went to the length of marring, scratching, and breaking articles unprotected by glass; a few proved to be pickpockets, and other brought with them peculiar habits, which were repulsive and unclean.
Flo Joe at Miami’s Marine Stadium. (All images courtesy of James and Karla Murray.)
By now, graffiti in cities like New York and L.A. and London and Berlin has been copiously documented. Which is why it was such a treat to pick up James and Karla Murray’s Miami Graffiti, which offers a broad survey of what’s been going down on that narrow strip of concrete that sits at the edge of the Everglades. Miami’s intense sunlight and weather seem to inspire a hyper-bright tropical color palette among its artists, and the Murrays do a good job of documenting it. The book covers everything from legal walls to abandoned industrial sites to transportation overpasses.
My favorite shots, however, are the ones that incorporate a broad view of the architecture, and truly reflect the ways in which graffiti artists play off of specific structural environments. The image of the giant tag by Flo Joe, at Miami’s stunning Marine Stadium (above), an abandoned Modernist boat racing viewing stand built in 1963, is a prime example.
The Murrays have been assiduously documenting graffiti since the ’90s and have thousands of images from New York, Miami and beyond, which have been published in various tomes. I’d like to suggest the topic of their next book: one that focuses exclusively on the way that graffiti interacts with architecture. I’ll be the first geek in line to buy it.
Miami Graffiti hits bookstores this month.
Junk and Rekal, at an old industrial site in Miami.
A gypsy boy with concrete weights, 1997 by Boogie. (Image courtesy of PowerHouse Books.)
Belgrade Belongs to Me, a book of photographs by Boogie, of his hometown, taken throughout the ’90s and into last year.
From the introduction:
I remember at one point, my mom’s entire pension bought us two pounds of onions. People were looking through garbage containers for scraps of food. Retired people were starving, and many of them committed suicide so they wouldn’t die of hunger. It was common knowledge that suicide rates were through the roof, although the official numbers were never released.
See Boogie’s website here.
Diary of Wimpy Kid: A Novel in Cartoons by Jeff Kinney.
P. 173:
The cartoon panel leads me to wonder if Kinney is a former museum flack.
Sorry, Tyler, I couldn’t resist the gag. Though, I would like to second one of the sentiments offered in the cartoon: Girls do, indeed, RULE. 
Posted by C-Monster.
The Modern Art Kids Crew, in Lost.
Eyeone of the Seeking Heaven crew in L.A. was kind enough to send me a copy of a beautifully-designed book he just produced called Lost: Graffiti in the City of Angels. This photo-heavy spiral hardback features a decade’s worth of L.A. graffiti and covers more ground than anyone with a set of four wheels and a camera could possibly hope to do.
Los Angeles, with its endless miles of concrete riverbeds, industrial drain pipes, arroyos and alleyways is a great location for graff, but unless you know where the heck you’re going, you can spend a lot of time looking at nothing. This book, however, is a great chronicle of both new and older works in places the average person would never find on their own. A lot of the pieces are long gone, produced by artists who are also gone. Thankfully for the rest of us, their work has been well recorded.
Want a preview? Follow the jump for pix of random images from the book.
This Means Nothing, by Le Bijoutier.
The other day I picked up this recently-released photographic tome on NYC street art to check out what got featured. There’s some good stuff in here, pieces – like Skewville’s Ride or Die sculpture (see it after the jump) – that have long been lost to the real estate developers glassifying downtown. There are a number of spots featured in the book that at some point or another, I’ve photographed myself, so I figured I’d do a small round-up. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pick up the book. Le Bijoutier has waaaaay more stuff than I feature here and it’s all very nicely showcased: just photos, and like the title implies, no long-winded essays about the meaning of it all.
Click to supersize. Images after the jump.
Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer, a book about how some artists and writers unknowingly anticipated the biggest discoveries in the field of neuroscience.
P. 119:
A Cezanne painting admits that the landscape is made of negative space, and that the bowl of fruit is a collection of brushtrokes. Everything has been bent to fit the canvas. Three dimensions have been flatted into two, light has been exchanged for paint, the whole scene has been knowingly composed. Art, Cezanne reminds us, is surrounded by artifice.
The shocking fact is that sight is like art. What we see is not real. It has been bent to fit our canvas, which is the brain. When we open our eyes, we enter into an illusory world, a scene broken apart by the retina and re-created by the cortex. Just as a painter interprets a picture, we interpret our sensations. But no matter how precise our neuronal maps become, they will never solve the question of what we actually see, for sight is a private phenomenon. The visual experience transcends the pixels of the retina and the fragmentary lines of the visual cortex.
It is art, and not science that is the means by which we express what we see on the inside. The painting, in this respect is closest to reality. It is what gets us nearest to experience. When we stare at Cezanne’s apples, we are inside his head.
Lehrer also has a blog called The Frontal Cortex.
Posted by C-Monster.
The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd.
P. 67: “Bliss is putting a lit match to every fart of Art Dogma this gassy century has seen fit to squeak out.”
Posted by C-Monster.
You Can Run But You Can’t Hide by Dog the Bounty Hunter.
P. 120: “I’ve always had a thing for smart women, especially smart women with big tits.”
Posted by C-Monster.