More on: art

In ballet class they were always chiding us to not allow the difficulty of the act to be expressed in the hands… We girls were being taught the art of concealing art, ars est celare artem, the method wherein obfuscation becomes a weft to gird the warp of technique.

We’re talking here about two projects: rereading art history to recover a wider context for religious meaning, and rereading it to recover a wider sense of the art historical project. You are aiming at the first, which is the larger and more important one, but our examples have been mainly the second, which would be a tonic to the discipline.

Later on, in high school, I would see those same artworks in my books and listen to my professor explaining their importance. Probably because they were within a five-minute walk and I knew them by heart, I didn’t have any real interest in them, nor in any of what Pasolini would call “my intimate, profound, archaic Catholicism.” I was interested in Hegel.

I’m waiting for that strange experience when a picture speaks, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a shout, sometimes with a reverberating silence that pulls me to the edge of a precipice where I’m not sure whether I’ll fall or fly.

Katherine Mooney Brooks on art, illness, and the failures of the body

You are alone naked in a forest, surrounded. Alone, surrounded by a live ossuary of trees, shed twig, spell of oval stone.

I’m tired of beauty. Or rather, I’m tired of hearing the word “beauty” overused and misapplied.