Category Archives: Art & Creativity

A Blog Worth Following

If you have even a passing interest in the arts scene in the SF Bay Area, do yourself a favor and check out Chloe Veltman’s excellent blog, lies like truth.

It’s one of the most refreshingly paced blogs I’ve come across. Veltman posts a few times a week and the posts are short, but very concise. She’s a good enough writer that she can cover a lot of ground in a small amount of space, so even after just a few paragraphs, you feel like you got a lot of solid information.

The range of topics is wide: theatre, the visual arts, and many genres of music all fall within her radar. Her criticism is intelligent and well-balanced, and she highlights artists and work often missed by the larger media outlets but still worthy of attention.

The quality of her work has attracted an equally intelligent audience: the signal-to-noise ratio of the user comments is as high as you’ll find anywhere.

Perhaps that thing I like the most is that her posts remind me of how vibrant and diverse the arts scene in the Bay Area is. I no longer take for granted how lucky we are to live here. It helps, even in a small way, to make the cost of living here a little easier to bear.

Ansel Adams on Art

Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these.

– Ansel Adams, in a letter to Cedric Wright

Hat tip to Amy Lesko at the Beauty Dialogues

The Treason Of The Artist

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it.

But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold, we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

- Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

During the years of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, Matisse painted the most charming flowers and fruit that were ever made. That’s why today they still speak more eloquently than the most macabre description of the period. Their creator was faithful not to the tragedy but to the reaction that tragedy kindled in his conscience.

- Odysseus Elytis, translated by Theophanis Stavrou: Books Abroad, Volume 49, no 4, Autumn 1975 [emphasis mine]

I firmly believe that joy is more fertile than pain.

- Maurice Ravel

Thanks to Rob Brezsny for the first two quotes (he’s been on quite a tear lately!).

On Criticism

All I can say is “word”:

I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better.

Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

-Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” interview in Le Monde, 1980

Hat tip to Rob Brezsny.