Slog - Comments on Mysterious Broadcasts http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/01/mysterious_broadcasts Ken Kelly's Theory, oil and enamel on canvas, 2007 Behind the desk at James Harris Gallery hangs a dirty-white painting by Squeak Carnwath that reads, in pencil scrawl in the center, "Painting is no ordinary object." Right-o. A painting is an extraordinary thing. Or: painting is a verb, not a noun. Fine. Whatever. While you're trying on the various attitudes toward painting, Carnwath's scratchy, splotchy surface, with its assertions, glitches, and erasures, takes over. Painting always wins. A writer I know says painting never dies because, deep down, we love it so much that we want it to succeed.... Copyright 2008 Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:30:30 -0800 Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:58:37 -0800 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.34 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Comment by unPC To get more hits, obviously, you need to ask:

is this art racist?

]]> unPC http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/01/mysterious_broadcasts#c907973 http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/01/mysterious_broadcasts#c907973 Visual Art Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:01:27 -0800 Comment by The CHZA The difference between writing and painting is that you can paint dots, a line, maybe two lines, splatter it, just slather dirty water around, make patterns, whatever, and get people like Graves to ruminate over them like they're the freaking Rosetta Stone, whereas if somebody writes a book that just has the letter "G" in 108 point font on each page for 200 pages or writes "duckduckduckduckduck" in the shape of a duck and "cowcowcowcowcow" in the shape of a cow and so on, literary critics and readers alike go "What the shit is this worthless crap?" and toss it.
Toss it out of the literary field into the art field for Graves and Friends, where you can paint poop on a paper plate and write an essay about it in 12 different ways.

]]> The CHZA http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/01/mysterious_broadcasts#c908055 http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/01/mysterious_broadcasts#c908055 Visual Art Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:58:37 -0800