I go for the Coffee...

...but stay for the friendship.

Linda Tharp and I have become pacing partners in the world of art. Taking a concept from the "straight" or not-art business world, we are helping each other to move our art careers forward.

This involves keeping honest to the goals we just created as part of the Artist as Entrepreneur Boot Camp (more about this later) at the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Linda and I are very different types of people and very different types of artists. This partnering has the effect of making us both stronger. As well, I feel we are at the beginning of a new art movement. Not defined, by painting style or concept, but by a new way that artists view themselves and how artists view their place in and their value to the world.

...and the coffee is good and hot and attractive.

Conceptual

Oblique Directions

Unfinished Business

This video turned up as part of a course I am taking on Abstract Expressionism. It is provocatively symbolic. It announces the room where the Rothko's given to the Tate by Rothko will hang, without showing any of the works.

The backstory is this... Rothko repudiated his agreement to provide 600 square feet of paintings for the the new Four Seasons restaurant at the Seagram Building in New York. Rothko later gave nine of the paintings that he had intended for the Four Seasons to the Tate, insisting on an exclusive room for his paintings. On the morning he died, after slitting his arms, creating a a pool of blood roughly the same size as and as abstract as his own paintings, the works arrived at the Tate.

At the request of Rothko, The Tate, like the Phillips Collection, has created a special room to view the works. This video was created to announce the "Room."

We might all agree the color and luminosity of Rothko's works have a transformative power. As distillation of human experience, his works are not just abstract exercises. So...can this video be re-contexturalized as a post modern abstract exercise? An "abstracted" commentary, devoid of color, luminosity, and human experience, on the packaging of art?

Stripped of all content, yet referencing it, Rothko repackaged and absent — an unfinished installation and unfinished Beethoven too. How modern can you get?

We're back...NEW NEW NEW

John Kilduff paints while jogging on a treadmill, blends a drink and takes your calls live! NEW NEW NEW media!

It woulda been nice...

It would have been nice if Google's valentine of yesterday had used the opportunity to pay homage to Robert Indiana. Indiana is the artist who first created the famous "LOVE" block. You know, the one that's been riffed on time and time again. Google could have used the opportunity to promote how an artist, and what he/she does can enrich our lives.

At the very least, I hope Google paid him, or that Indiana put it out there for anyone, royalty free etc. to use. Otherwise, he might have to sue them using the Carter Kustera idea of "commercial confusion." ...a whiff of Eau de Litigation in the air, sounds like a modern romance to me.

A valentine for you from Susan and Kurt!