Comments on: Agoraphobia

By: Glen Helfand

Glen Helfand — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 21:22:13 +0000

Thanks for these comments– I’m liking this idea of overlap!

By: Christine Wong Yap

Christine Wong Yap — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 14:59:43 +0000

Glen, your points are spot-on! Our time feels so surreal. I find myself asking, “What does this mean?”–realizing, of course, that major transitions like this take time to play out, and time to make sense of. I’m so excited to read contextualizations, questions, speculations, and opinions from you and the participants on this forum.

I love that cross-connections are already forming… I have only one bone of contention with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, “Creativity”–which inspired the first third of Positive Signs–and it relates to your point about making art more “visibly altruistic.” In the final chapter, Csikszentmihalyi advises readers to increase their creativity and their happiness derived from it by ensuring that some aspect of their work serves public good (though paradoxically, he also acknowledges that being free to pursue one’s fancy is fundamental to creativity). He gives an example: Renaissance art patrons commissioned Florentine painters and sculptors to create artworks that impressed the masses (debatable?). It suggests how being an artist and being a citizen can overlap, to personal and social benefit. Yet it lends the artist no greater insight about how to make compelling art, or how citizens become agents with real power.

By: Suzanne

Suzanne — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:04:07 +0000

Glen, this post hits awfully close to home. I wake up in the middle of the night often, asking myself if the energies I put into organizing people at SFMOMA might not be better spent (more socially constructive) organizing in an environment of direct political action. (Wow, can I type that into my employer’s/my own comment box? I just did.) Which is to say that the weight of balance of my curiosity is often towards “cultural revision rather than aesthetic innovation” these days as well. (with a still lingering hope that the two aren’t irrevocably divorced.) Looking so forward to your posts.

By: Tucker Nichols

Tucker Nichols — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 22:44:46 +0000

Thanks for this Glen.
Weird how the art world can be such a potent mix of empty and full, huh. I feel like Im constantly bumping up against one side or the other. According to the news these days, the world is seemingly on the verge of our own kind of colony collapse disorder. And at the same time, the art market is gaining steam again and the Armory Show is roaring along and everyone is tweeting about what they just saw and it’s all pretty confusing. For me art isnt so good for political commentary or even escape–how lost can you really get in a painting even if it moves you–but maybe because art is a way of trying to figure out where we are in the world we gain a bit of solid footing when it does set off a spark in us. Its fleeting and sometimes even the most moving stuff looks like a pile of video screens or another giant canvas if you turn away for a second, but honestly Im not sure theres another way for all of us who like to look at it, make it, write about it or even go to VIP openings in Miami Beach. Sometimes I scratch my head, and eventually I itch to get back in the studio or the museum to feel something again. The news can be so depressing.
Tucker