David Correll Studio, Brooklyn, NY

It brought great sadness to my heart today to hear of the death of the visionary author and dreamer, Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke is best known as the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and collaborating on film of the same name with Stanley Kubrick.

I spent hours upon hours in Perkins and Denny’s in my early 20’s, discussing what the Monolith was, why HAL did what he did, what the Star Child is, analyzing every single shot of both movies, praising Clarke and Kubrick—obsessing, geeking, loving. (more…)

Last time I checked, we all die.

When I was a teenager, I remember people talking about how teenagers thought they were going to live forever. As I have grown up, I have come to understand both that and my own mortality more and more. Friends and relatives have died, my patch of gray hair is now more than just a patch, and small cuts and bruises don’t heal as well anymore.

We are all given a certain number of days on this earth: statistically, as an American living in 2008, around 28307 — 77.5 years. Certainly, we’re all different, and of course there are things we can do to shorten or extend that. Smoking for 15 years didn’t help, but quitting almost 8 months ago did, for one example. (more…)

Congrats go out to my good friend Clint Fisher on the launch of Aenon Fire, a labor of love long in the making. Clint has been working on this for a long time, and has come out of it with a fantastic initial launch. Go check it out — and watch out for my cameo in Psychedelic Renaissance.

Way to go, Clint!

The New York Times released a story today about the current shows at Deitch Gallery, one featuring veteran Barry McGee and the other Swoon. I was at work when I saw it, and didn’t have much time to read it, but passed it on to my friend, Swoon fan Clint Fisher. He responded a while later by directing me to his response to it. It was at that point that I finally started to think about what I read, and about his response.

Like Clint, I too have always hated the term “outsider art.” I’ve always felt that it was kind of a back-handed compliment from the art establishment to artists that, as Clint says in his post, they have tried to assimilate, but have failed. In general, I think this would result in them refusing to acknowledge the work as art. But in some cases — Swoon, Barry McGee, Kaws and Raymond Pettibon all come to mind — the art is too good to deny, so the establishment has no choice but to call it art. Forced with having to show respect for it, but angered with their inability to assimilate a true individual, they accept it, but back-hand it with the label “outsider.”

A flipside to this, and another way that I think the term is used, is in the fight to find the “next big thing.” A dealer will find an artist that doesn’t fit the norms, and hasn’t been assimilated, but may be well established and respected in their own scene (as Swoon and McGee in the graf scene, and Pettibon in the punk/hardcore scene). The art establishment can’t let something good go by without claiming to have discovered it (ditto that for the music industry), so they have invented the term “outsider art” as a lable for something that they do not own, and cannot otherwise label.

The art industry, as well as society as a whole, hates things that cannot be labeled, and they will go out of their way to either find a way to label it, or find a way to dismiss it.

Regardless of what the Times calls it, Swoon’s art is incredible. Check out Clint’s feature on her, and if you’re in NYC, check out the show at Deitch. Outsider or not, her work is too good to be missed.