We also know how cruel truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.
— Henri Poincare
There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good.
— Stephen Colbert
Now the work of art also represents a state of final equilibrium, of accomplished order and maximum relative entropy, and there are those who resent it. But art is not meant to stop the stream of life. Within a narrow span of duration and space the work of art concentrates a view of the human condition; and sometimes it marks the steps of progression, just as a man climbing the dark stairs of a medieval tower assures himself by the changing sights glimpsed through its narrow windows that he is getting somewhere after all.
— Rudolph Arnheim
All music is folk music. I ain't never heard no horse sing a song.
— Louis Armstrong
Friday Overture: Beyond Here LIes Nothing
continuing at Hallwalls thru June 5
ALFONSO VOLO: Thrifting For Beauty
gallery hours Tues to Fri 11am to 6pm, Sat 11am to 2pm
Buffalo News Dabkowski
Here's an Artvoice review by Tim Raymond.
@ Hallwalls June 3
Opening Elsewhere
• 2009 Annual Area Artists Show @ The Albright Knox/Clifton hall op Fri, May 15, 5-7pm (thru May 17)
• Mark Freeland @ Gateway Studios, closing reception Fri, May 15, 8-11pm
• KC Kratt @ Grant Street Gallery op Fri, May 15, 6-8 pm (thru May 21)
• Duayne Hatchett at the Burchfield, op Fri, May 15, 6:30-8:30 (thru Aug 30)
Duayne Hatchet: Form, Pattern and Invention: A 60 Year Retrospective
op @ the Burchfield TONIGHT 6:30—8:30pm
Mark Freeland Retrospective Closing Tonight
William Koch, Amy Robinson Gendrou, Rosemary Bauer Sroka, Kathleen Sherin
op @ Buffalo Art Studios Fri, June 12, 7-10pm
BCP, BPO, BSE, Stravinsky, Visser't Hooft: May 27, $15
A Soldier's Tale
Continuing Elsewhere
• Buffalo Society of Artists @ Betty's thru July 12
• Fables and Truths @ Starlight thru June 26
• Lawrence Brose @ Studio Hart thru June 20
• Amy Greenan @ the Castellani thru May 17 and Kara Walker thru May 31 and Jed Jackson thru Sept 20
• Richard Kersting, Fran Noonan @ Meiborn (E. Aurora) thru May 30
• Craig Smith @ Bob Schultz,, Tim Raymond, Joe Moran, Bob Schulman, Francisco Amaya, Candace Keegan, Neil Mahar, Joe Kerwin, Amands Giczkowski, Nick DeMarchi, John Farallo, Ginny Stewart, Chris McGee, Val Dunne, Eileen Graetz, Adam Kessler, Dario Mohr @ College Street Gallery thru May 31
• David Andree @ Burchfield Nature & Art Center thru June 13
• Michael Beitz, Letha Wilson @ Buffalo Arts Studio thru May 22
• Kara Daving @ EcoCenter San Francisco thru June 20
• Saya Woolfalk, Ani Hoover @ UB Art Gallery thru June 20
• Visions of Greater Buffalo @ CEPA Sat, Apr 25, 7-9:30
• Stephen Antonakos, Warren Isensee, Gary Lang, Melissa Meyers, Katherine Sehr @ Nina Freudenheim thru June 12
• Rita Argen Auerbach at The Mansion on Delaware (until daylight savings time ends)
• Diane Baker at The Mansion on Delaware (indefinitely)
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Olean Public Library
"The Olean Public Library gallery has been providing exhibition space for New York State artists since 1974. This gives artists both exposure for their art and exhibiting experience while providing residents and visitors to the greater Olean area a venue for seeing the work of contemporary visual artists. Selection of artists is based on artistic quality and potential of the work, with an emphasis on emerging artists. Work is selected through an ongoing open call for slide & cd submissions, followed by studio visits with the artists. Artists working in all media are shown. Artists interested in exhibiting at the Olean Public Library should sent a packet of materials to Cynnie Gaasch Gallery Curator, Olean Public Library, PO Box 284, Buffalo, NY 14205. DEADLINE: May 30, 2009."
"Despite this drawback, I know that I have a fierce supermodel dormant within me and I believe the best way to get in touch with her is through a careful study of other supermodels."
artnet Reverend Jen
“John’s heart was here. Even when he was in Liverpool, and London. He used to show me that famous Bob Dylan album cover, where he’s walking with a girl and he’d say, ‘That should have been me, I could have been a New Yorker.’"
NY Times
"Mik's most notorious piece is at MoMA, Scapegoats (2006), a slow-motion ballet of a hostage situation held in an airplane hangar."
artnet Finch
"The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth has acquired what some scholars now say is the first known painting made by Michelangelo. And if he created it, he did so when he was only 12 or 13."
NY Times
"So there is a whole category of adjectives not often seen in the vicinity of its name, words like curvaceous, diaphanous, voluptuous, lissome. Or, of course, fleshy, glandular, uvular, uterine."
NY Times
"The extraordinary scope of his genius, which touched on every aspect of American life, makes him one of the most daunting figures of the 20th century. But to many he is still the vain, megalomaniacal architect, someone who trampled over his clients’ wishes, drained their bank accounts and left them with leaky roofs."
NY Times
"Many of his peers gripe that this is because of the subdued nature of his designs — sophisticated but not too threatening or unfamiliar — which seem tailored to ease the insecurities of museum boards. Some envy his elegance, which makes him seem equally at home in corporate boardrooms and lofty cultural circles."
NY Times
"Unlike Warhol and other Pop artists, the Oldenburg of the early 1960s liked to serve his art raw. He was attracted to messy piles of diner food rather than soup cans, the handmade rather than the mass-produced and the generic rather than the branded."
NY Times
"But a newly completed museum wing of this scope is by definition the beginning of a longer, more subtle work in progress. It is now the curators’ turn to explore its strengths and limitations."
NY Times
“One night we saw Jennifer Jones get out of a limo and I thought how elegant she was; years later, I was doing her house, and I told her that story.”
NY Times
"Her visual style seemed to embrace the old masters and the Ashcan school in equal measure; in later years, it also incorporated a dash of deliberate strangeness that some critics described as magic realism."
NY Times obit
There's no popular musician alive doing anything remotely as interesting as Bob Dylan. He's an artist who manages to work within existing, familiar forms of music—country, folk, blues, cowboy—and create a space that is wholly and utterly his own. While being the opposite of avant garde or subversive, he nonethess manages to concoct something that's uniquely distinctive. As I've found through the entirety of his career, no one sounds like Dylan. Whole books have been written—and should be written—about his adept facility with lyrics, but he's also always been about the sound. Blonde On Blonde is an astounding record for, among other reasons, its evocation of a cosmic, ethereal sound by using basically a band of country musicians. On the opposite end, try the much-less-critically-revered (some might say critically reviled, some accusing Dylan of "going Vegas") Street Legal, where a large MOR-style band of top flight professional musicians and backup singers help Dylan whip up a weird, mystical sound that is as brilliant as it is strange.
The man is 68 years old, hasn't got a damn thing to prove to anyone, and is astonishingly at the top of his game. When John Lennon was murdered in 1980, I remember thinking, At least let Bob Dylan age into a way cool old guy, even if he's just sitting on a stool singing the blues. Well, the way cool old guy has come into sharp focus over the past fifteen years and folk, Bob's yer fucking uncle alright and it's best you pay heed. This is a funny album, a whimsical album, a mournful album, a sweet, sweet ride of songs that sound—as Izzy Young remarked of Dylan's earliest work—contemporary and old at the same time. I hear Tex-Mex here, but I also hear Gershwin. I hear the history of American music, tempered with a voice that's as aware of its age and fragility as it is its strength and tenderness. His current band remains ridiculously good—so much so you can IGNORE the lyrics entirely and be utterly entranced. Add to the mix David Hidalgo from Los Lobos rocking the accordian(!!!) on every track and the sound that's been so good the last several albums expands into something new entirely. Dylan proves repeatedly that there's plenty to be done within so-called existing forms.
As we did when Dylan began his career 47 YEARS AGO, we live in a world of turmoil, trouble,fear, and if it sometimes sounds like he doesn't trust that world—Bob may be your uncle but he's also been nobody's fool—it also sounds like he can't live without it. To paraphrase Tristan Tzara, he does it to give you pleasure, kind listener, he loves you so I swear he does adore you.
I've never met Bob and likely never will, but as I played the album from start to finish while driving around the Arizona desert with Claire Schneider, I thought to myself, I'm walking the earth at the same time as this guy. Whew.
I like the morality thing. People talk about it all the time. Some say you can't legislate morality. Well, maybe not. But morality has gotten kind of a bad rap. In Roman thought, morality is broken down into into basically four things: Wisdom, Justice, Moderation, and Courage. All of these are elements that would make up the depth of a person's morality. And then that would dictate the types of behavior patterns you'd use to respond in any given situation. I don't look at morality as a religious thing.
— Bob Dylan
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