Mary Boone is a NYC art dealer with galleries in Soho, Chelsea and on 5th Avenue above the men’s Bergdorf Goodman department. She used to represent Jean Michel Basquiat. Problems between the equally charismatic Basquiat and Mary Boone have been a constant part of their relationship.

Mary Boone represented Mr. Basquiat for four years. She called him a talented but erratic artist, often distracted by the glittery art world that seized on his work in the early 1980’s.

‘’He was too much into what people said about him. If your goal is to make great paintings, then you listen to an internal voice, to yourself,'’ she said.

‘’He was ambivalent about his work and his success. The only thing he wasn’t ambivalent about was being a painter,'’ said Miss Boone, who added that he often expressed concern about whether his works were popular and selling well.

By the time he joined Miss Boone in 1982, she said, he also had become a regular user of addictive drugs, although he denied having a habit. Other acquiantances said Mr. Basquiat picked up a heroin habit in the early 1980’s, and increased his use after he became wealthy. Several friends and business associates said the artist was frequently offered drugs, both by dealers and private collectors, in exchange for his work.

Miss Boone said Mr. Basquiat’s use of drugs made him an inconsistent artist and sometimes rendered him virtually incapable of working.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Mary Boone as a punching bag), 1984-85 }

It’s not a good time to be an art critic. Much of what’s written is pale. It is weak and descriptive to no purpose. Or at the other extreme it is pure jargon, laughable if read aloud to the uninitiated. Junk. In fact, if art critics actually believed that anything we said or wrote mattered, we would probably be shooting ourselves in droves.

It is, however, a good time to be an artist. The heroic days of hard drinking at the Cedar and a fistfight with Jackson Pollock are over. But on the positive side of the ledger you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want and there’s someone out there fully prepared to take it seriously. Some lament this fact; they want a criterion back. I don’t. Critics are the owls of Minerva, flying around at dusk. We don’t command and determine the facts, and never did. Merely do we pick at corpses, sorting a few things out, making explicit what was already there, etc., etc.

The 2008 Whitney Biennial is a feast and a free-for-all as far as the artists are concerned. You can make a realist painting (for God’s sake) or you can stick some poles and a stretch of metal fence into a block of cement. (…)

But it is very difficult to say what the work relates to or where it is coming from. Even a knowledge of art history antique and contemporary won’t help you much. These days art isn’t an insiders game so much as a contest in private languages. The artists are often working in their own heads and they don’t feel much compulsion to translate.

This puts the critic and the curator in a hilarious position. Stripped of most of our authority, we fall back on tortured syntax and dubious vocabulary in order merely to say, in essence, that it is tough to talk about art these days. Here’s a typical sentence from the Biennial catalog: “Charles Long’s interest in opposing formal and metaphysical forces informs a complex sculptural lexicon marked by radical stylistic shifts that are difficult to categorize.”

The simple translation of this sentence: “Help, I don’t really know what Charles Long is doing or why.”

{ The Smartset | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982 | acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas }

There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them.

Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On the contrary, people who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

“I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at, and I didn’t know it,” Dunning said.

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly. “Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,” wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.

This deficiency in “self-monitoring skills,” the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market — and repeatedly lose out — and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.

In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to “grossly overestimate” how well they had performed. (…) Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study were likely to underestimate their competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were — a phenomenon psychologists term the “false consensus effect.”

{ San Francisco Chronicles | Continue reading }

previously { The Dunning-Kruger effect }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brain, 1985 | acrylic, gresso, oil painstick, and paper collage on wood boxes with bootblack stand, twenty-seven boxes }

I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I’ve conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving.

This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago–at a touch, on my laptop. With 10-megapixel cameras costing just over $100, you can easily capture a dozen full pages in a single shot, in just a second.

{ How to Think | MIT Technology Review | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (An Advertisement for Soda), 1981 | crayon on paper }