What to read in the studio this week.

Edward Winkleman's "Occupy Your Studio" post contains several gems including:

"What new models will emerge to clear the cacophony and confusion must be dictated by artists and their work. That's the only meaningful reason the market or the art world at large exists...to nurture the current generation of artists, so the important ones emerge and actually realize their full potential. All the rest of it, the parties, the glamor, the egos, the two-spread pages in the fashion magazines...and I indict most of the artists out there as well as the dealers, collectors, and fair organizers with those distractions...all of that is fun but ultimately meaningless."

and  

"I'm serious. In the middle of the night, when I wake frozen in an existential panic about all the bills and stress of competition and the endless fragility of everyone involved, I gently work myself back to sleep thinking about the importance of leaving a meaningful record of our generation for posterity...what we were really like. I comfort myself with thoughts of what importance my tiny role in this process has."

Over at The Brooklyn Rail, author and painter, Richard Kalina attempts to divide painting into categories, a critical rubric or sorts, as he talks about the general state of painting in his essay, The Four Corners of Painting. Too many points to consider in a sound byte, but I leave you with this:

"We are living in an age where various forces, primarily market-driven, but also critical, curatorial, and educational, are fostering a decidedly ahistorical attitude. A willed loss of historical perspective has a not-so-hidden implication—and that is that all work is perforce new and fresh, that it springs from the artist’s absolute individuality and therefore should not be questioned from the point of view of history, although it ought to be granted the very prerogatives accorded in the modernist past to “groundbreaking” art. This does us all a disservice."