Word: artful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hockney is the least arrogant of men, and his achievement, uneven though it looks, is a distinguished one. It can be assayed in the retrospective of some 200 works -- paintings, prints, drawings, photocollages, stage designs -- that, having originally been put together by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, opens this week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art...
Hockney was by no means the first English artist to make his homosexuality a theme of his art, but he was the first to do it in a garrulous, social way, treating his appetites as the most natural thing in the world and not, like Francis Bacon, as a pretext for reflection on Eros' power to maim and dominate. His code for the subject in the early '60s was graffiti. Flattened scrawly figures with sticks for limbs and blobs for heads, much influenced by Jean Dubuffet, populate a whole set of images from 1960 to 1963 -- Doll Boy, The Fourth...
...George Gershwin had been a natural composer, said that a true artist is like an apple tree, and when he feels the need, he bursts into flower without ever thinking about the market price of apples. Conversely, it would seem that an apple tree is a work of art, a rhapsody in green and white. And it grows -- this is the miracle -- from a little brown seed no more than half an inch long, of which there are half a dozen inside every apple core that you throw into the garbage pail...
Remember, in short, that gardening is quite different from farming. The function of farming is to produce crops, food; the function of gardening, if it has one, is to delight the planter. Farming is essentially commerce; it exists for gain. Gardening is essentially art; it exists for itself. While the 20th century has turned farming into agribusiness, gardening rejects most of modernity's most cherished values. "More" and "faster" have little place in the garden, not to mention cost efficiency or the bottom line. It is to escape such things that one began digging...
There is no sign in the 558 pages of Picasso: Creator and Destroyer that Huffington has given a day's close thought to Picasso's art -- or anyone else's. To her, Picasso is mainly interesting as a celebrity with an odious character: a user, all but incapable of real affection, destructive to his friends, brutal to his women, cruelly indifferent to his children. Some of this is, of course, true, and it has not been a secret for years. The Big P.'s personal life was no oil painting, and Huffington documents it with zeal, leaving...