inspiration – Page 12

Some Writings On Giacometti & Looking

These are mostly for me, just kind of gathered here without order or comment for the moment. I’ve been thinking about Alberto Giacometti lately, and his sculptural, spatial pursuit of that moment when a figure comes into view.
Arthur C Danto in The Nation 2001 about Sartre in 1948 on Giacometti:

Sartre says something even more striking about Giacometti’s figures. “The moment I see them, they appear in my field of vision the way an idea appears in my mind.” This is a way of explaining the somewhat ghostly feeling of his figures, as if they were persons whose bodies had been all but erased. Giacometti was legendary for destroying his work–his studio floor would be found littered with broken plaster in the morning, after undoing a night’s work. I think this was the result of an impossible effort to eliminate whatever gave them the solidity that belonged to their material condition as sculpture.

Rosalind Krauss in Artforum 2001 quoting Sartre in 1948 on Giacometti:

“Giacometti,” Sartre wrote, “has restored an imaginary and indivisible space to statues. He was the first to take it into his head to sculpt man as he appears, that is to say, from a distance.” And because this is man as he is perceived, it is fitting that these sculptures should all be vertical, since Sartre equates perception with walking, traversing space, doing things, just as he links imagining with the body’s repose. If one dreams lying down–as in the sculptor’s earlier, Surrealist, s leeping women–one perceives standing up.

Michael Kimmelman in NYT 2001 on Giacometti’s MoMA retrospective:

In the 1940’s and 50’s, when he made extremely thin heads, flattened on both sides like pancakes, Giacometti talked about the effect of looking at somebody straight on, then from the side. He was rejecting the Cubist idea that it was possible to keep different views of the same person in sight at the same time. ”If I look at you from the front, I forget the profile,” he said. ”If I look at you in profile, I forget the front view.” Which is precisely what happens: if we move 30 degrees left or right off-center of these heads, the face becomes a profile. Back six inches, the profile disappears. If we move: the work is about our distance from the figures, our position vis-a-vis the heads or striding men or standing women.

Kimmelman in the NYT 1996 reviewing David Sylvester’s incredible book, Looking at Giacometti:

The issue for Giacometti became the pursuit of what he called likeness. Roughly, it had to do with trying to represent the real experience of seeing, apart from artistic conventions: on the simplest level, conveying the actual swimmy sense of distance and engulfing space when viewing figures across, say, a broad street, or conversely, the vertiginous foreshortening you get when standing face to face with someone. Likeness also had to do with something less tangible but still real: the intense sensation of the shared gaze between living artist and living model. Mr. Sylvester contrasts Giacometti with Matisse in this respect. “The Matisse sculptures present a figure seen whole and entire now, in an instant of time, in any instant of time, meaning outside time,” he writes. “The Giacometti sculptures seem to present figures as they are perceived while time passes.”

I’ve GOT to get Sylvester’s book out of storage this weekend. That, and Herbert Matter’s photobook of Giacometti’s sculptures. I have my Bonnefoy, of course, which is beautiful to look at, but nearly impossible to read. Just, wow, what is going on there?
image: City Square, 1948, via moma.org

What I Looked At In 1995: Vermeer’s View Of Delft

The inconvenient intrusion of war and political upheaval [i.e., the collapse of the Dutch government and the looming withdrawal of Dutch troops from their frontline deployment in Afghanistan] into my Dutch Landscapes project has sent me trying to re-find some discussion of Vermeer that’s stuck with me for years.
Like so many hundreds of thousands of others, I made a trip to the National Gallery in Washington in the winter of 1995 to see the first Vermeer exhibition in almost 300 years. It was a DC that may be hard for folks today to even conceive of: the show was abruptly opening and closing, thanks to massive snowfall and two government shutdowns orchestrated by an obstructionist Republican agenda led by Newt Gingrich. [I know, right? He seems so nice.]
Anyway, 21 of the world’s 35 Vermeers were there, including View of Delft, loaned by the exhibitions only other venue, the Royal Gallery at the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
The Essential Vermeer puts the date depicted in the painting as early May, 1660 [the evidence: leaves on the trees, the boat activity, and the empty tower on the Nieuwe Kerk, because the bells were in the shop]. It seems so banal, so placid, so idyllic.
But I remember reading a discussion of how deceptive, or at least complicated, this peace was, in light of Delft’s own history. The argument centered on the high-contrast beam of sunlight Vermeer punched through his rainclouds to illuminate the Nieuwe Kerk, in the center background of the painting.
William of Orange had used Delft as a base for launching in 1568 what became the Eighty Years War, against Spain, the Hapsburgs, and the Holy Roman Empire, which turned on issues of religious intolerance, taxation without representation, and centralized power. William was assassinated in 1584, and because his family’s traditional seat, Breda, was still in Spanish hands, he was interred in the Nieuwe Kerk. So are his successors in the House of Orange-Nassau, who continued the fight, and who have ruled the Dutch Republic since it won its independence with the Treaty of Westphalia, which was signed on May 15, 1648.
But wait, there’s more! In 1660 the city was also still recovering and rebuilding after the Delft Thunderclap of 1654, a massive gunpowder explosion at a waterfront munitions warehouse that killed over 100 people–including one of Delft’s most well-known painters, Fabritius Carels–injured thousands more, and leveled a huge section of the city.
If Vermeer were alive in 2013, then, the equivalent painting might be the rainy skyline of lower New Amsterdam from the Hudson, where a ray of sunlight picks out the details of an unobstructed St Paul’s church–if George Washington and all the subsequent presidents were buried there. If there’s a Dutch equivalent of a bald eagle with a tear in its eye, Vermeer showed remarkable restraint by not including it.
UPDATE I’ll get out my DVD set in the morning to confirm, but I think Tyler Green’s right, it’s the first essay in Lawrence Weschler’s 2004 book, Vermeer in Bosnia, which was originally published as “Inventing Peace,” in The New Yorker, Nov. 20, 1995.
Yep, here we go, Weschler’s setup for the remarkable story of how the head of the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague kept himself sane by looking at the Vermeers at the Mauritshuis:

For, of course, when Vermeer was painting those images, which for us have become the very emblem of peacefulness and serenity, all Europe was Bosnia (or had only just been): awash in incredibly vicious wars of religious persecution and proto-nationalist formation.

Wow, maybe I should re-read the whole thing rather than post updates every page, but. Weschler quotes Harry Berger’s idea about Vermeer’s deployment of “‘conspicuous exclusion,’ of themes that are saturatingly present but only as a felt absence.”
What a fantastic phrase, which immediately reminds me of a comment left by Jerome Bertrand on Ogle Earth’s original 2006 coverage of the Dutch Google Map censorship issue:

All the same, someone at Royalty level (AIVD?) would choose to typically blur out certain private residences – so it ends up you can find them quicker than others by just scanning for blurred spots in the area. This is helpfull [sp] when you need to know what’s hot.

More Levine, More Meltdown

Here’s Sherrie Levine talking in 1993 about the making of her Meltdown woodblock print series with BAM’s Constance Lewallen in the Journal of Contemporary Art. Levine did just what Susan Tallman, who reviewed Meltdown kind of negatively in 1990, feared: she used the computer algorithm to color-average the entire images of Mondrian, Monet, etc., and then she used the “Mardenesque” greys to paint monochrome canvases. It wasn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
The JCA transcript has a funny find&replace quirk, where all the SL’s were replaced with Levine [e.g., slide >> Levineide]:

Lewallen: You did some woodblock prints recently, I noticed, that had to do with the “Meltdown” paintings. Where did you do them?
Levine: I worked with a wonderful printer, Maurice Sanchez. I had wanted to do prints based on a geometric grid with computer averages of colors of modern master paintings.
Lewallen: Which paintings did you use as a starting point?
Levine: For example, we used a Monet “Cathedral.” We put a Levineide of the picture into a computer with graphic capabilities and the computer created a grid in which each section corresponded to an average of the color in that section of the painting. The “Meltdown” paintings are based on the same principle but rather than being gridded off, they represent one uniform average for the whole surface. In fact, it’s funny, I had been wanting to make work after Marden’s early work, because some of his monochromes are some of my favorite paintings. For me they are the ultimate late-Modern paintings. I am also a big fan of Olivier Mosset’s monochrome paintings, and Yves Klein is another favorite of mine. For years I have been trying to think of a way to make monochromes that were interesting but not the same as those I admired, but I never came up with a solution. Then, when I was working on the print project, almost as a mistake, the computer also gave me the color average of the entire . . .
Lewallen: So, the print project preceded the paintings?
Levine: Yes, the average of the entire painting, all the colors in the painting, like when you mix your whole palette together you get these beautiful, Mardenesque greys and greens and mauves. And I realized I had finally found a method.
Lewallen: What were the colors like in the prints, working with color mixes from grid to grid?
Levine: They were much less greyed down than the paintings.
Lewallen: Depending on the section.
Levine: I originally thought they should be lithographs or silkscreens, and Maurice came up with the wonderful idea of woodcuts on Japanese rice paper. He used a high-tech method; he made a grid of the twelve tongue-and-groove blocks using a laser saw that he inked up separately and printed all at once. I liked the combination of high-tech and low-tech techniques.

Levine’s Meltdown (After Yves Klein), 1991, was in Daniel Birnbaum’s Italian Pavilion at Venice last year. AFC got the photo, if not the concept.

On Drop Shadows And Diagrammatic Abstraction

I swear, I didn’t plan to go all Errol Morris and do three posts about one photo in one catalogue about one artwork. So look at this other photograph!

The second thing you notice–first if you just crack it open, second if you start from the front–in the Serpentine Gallery’s Gerhard Richter | 4900 Colours is what I bought it for: page after page of reproductions of the panels in all eleven possible configurations. The Serpentine’s own Version II comes first, with large, 2×2 assemblies shown, one per page.
With drop shadows. Seriously. Drop shadows. Are these photographs? Part of me wants to think that photos in a Richter book would all be taken under such perfectly identical lighting that it creates exactly identical shadows. But I am doubtful.

There is one squeegee painting reproduced, but it has no shadow, or frame, or any indication of three dimensionality. And it’s pretty obvious that all the other Versions of 4900 Colours are illustrated, not by photos, but computer graphics–diagrams. Does this matter? And if it doesn’t, what does it mean to simulate three dimensionality with dropshadows?
Buchloh, whatchagot?

The Diagram
A diagram is not a painting. It’s as simple as that…I can make a painting from a diagram, but can you? – Frank Stella [ed note: this is from an apparently cantankerous 1964 radio interview with Judd, included in Gregory Battcock’s “Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology.”]
…the diagram contributed a dissenting voice to the heroic chorus of abstraction, recognizing the degree to which the painter and the spectator as perceptual and desiring subjects are always already contained in systems of spatio-temporal quantification, control, and statistical registration.

Mhmm. I like this idea of diagrammatic abstraction and how it is an overlooked underdog. But could that just be my own subjective anti-subjectivity talking? Maybe I agree because I happen to have found my own “schemata of statistical data collection” to use as my “necessary and primary matrices determining a pictorial/compositional order”?
Also, I don’t see how Richter’s “low-tech colour production [could] subvert the new digital spectacularisation of colour [8]” while he simultaneously publishes more-perfect-than-real digital simulacra of his work, augmented with Adobe Illustrator’s systems of simulated tempo-spatiality.

I take issue with this. I also realize that I’m putting Buchloh on the hook directly and Richter, too, by implication, for tiny, seemingly peripheral-to-picayune issues I have with the catalogue that fall well within the scope of book design. But they transform the book from a documentation to a blueprint, a schematic. Which is fine. But drop shadows?
And anyway, why should any spectator’s seemingly arbitrary perceptual minutiae take a back seat to Buchloh’s, or anyone else’s?
Do my questions really and truly seem less germane than this spectacular footnote to the digital spectacularisation of colour–I mean, wow. Just wow–and tell me what is going on here?

[8] It is certainly not accidental at all that at the time of the writing of this essay, a new electronic device operates on the site of an advertisement for eBay Europe. Under the imperative appellation ‘CHOOSE YOUR COLOUR’ a field of randomly ordered colour chips appears, very much in the manner of one of Richter’s earlier colour chip paintings. The site’s digitally vibrating colour squares appeal to spectators to find precisely ‘their colour’, i.e., to comply with an order to suture their desire (performed on the computer’s touch pad) and to yet another commodity to be acquired.

A banner ad on eBay Europe! What does Benjamin Buchloh buy–or sell?!–on eBay Europe? It is certainly not accidental at all!
Meanwhile, the commodity that is 4900 Colours, 2007, was acquired by La Collection de La Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la creation. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed reading an exhibition catalogue this much in fifteen years.
Gerhard Richter: 4900 Colours

Richter On Idiots

A 2001 visit to Gerhard Richter’s studio, from when Michael Kimmelman used to write about art:

He puts a canvas on an easel at the end of the room and slides the photograph into a projector. The photo appears, projected onto the canvas, and Richter begins to trace it with a piece of charcoal and a ruler. Tracing each minute detail of a photograph, as he does, usually takes Richter a couple of hours. Then he is ready to paint.
”Idiots can do what I do,” he says, although of course he doesn’t really think so. ”When I first started to do this in the 60’s, people laughed. I clearly showed that I painted from photographs. It seemed so juvenile. The provocation was purely formal — that I was making paintings like photographs. Nobody asked about what was in the pictures. Nobody asked who my Aunt Marianne was. That didn’t seem to be the point.”
The point, among other things, was to distance himself from the clichés of artistic expression — all the spontaneous, fiery, warm and fuzzy modes of painting — so as to make people really look and not reflexively swoon. By using deliberately banal photographs, impersonally mimicked, he was doing the exact opposite of what painting was expected to do, not grabbing a viewer by the lapels but methodically copying an everyday image. In time, some of the pictures have come to look expressively painted, perceptions having changed, but making methodical copies was Richter’s intent.

An Artist Beyond Isms [nyt via john bailey]

On Abstraction And The Ready-Made Gesture

As someone who backed into a project last September of making paintings of readymade abstraction, I was nervous, stoked, and inspired by “Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture,” the group show curated by Debra Singer which just closed yesterday at The Kitchen.
I feel like I have no business making paintings, frankly, and no matter how fantastic I find the Dutch Landscape images I’m using, I can’t help but wonder about the soundness of my basic idea. That said, it’s invigorating to see, just as I started poking deeper into the techniques and drivers of various strains of abstract painting, an abstraction show full of artists I really like.
Colby Chamberlain articulates the show’s ambivalence quite nicely in his Artforum review:

Thus merged, abstraction and the readymade risk canceling out each other’s legacies. The secondhand status of a readymade sunders abstraction from its aspirational and emotive content, whereas the uninflected appearance of an abstract painting curbs the readymade’s penchant for mischief. (To this day, nothing accommodates the definition of “art” so comfortably as stretched canvas.)

Add photography to the mix, and it only gets more complicated. I think of an artist like Liz Deschenes whose work regularly and rigorously addresses painting and abstraction at the same time it pushes the understanding of the photographic subject and process. And then there’s the whole OG school of found abstractionists like Aaron Siskind. And Richter. I still can’t help but think that readymade and abstraction are just two of the many balls he keeps in the air as he paints. Anyway, I’m rambling now. Great show at a great space with a beautiful website that’s as tauntingly useless as a diamond ring encased in a paperweight.

On Rotating The Dishes

Sometimes I worry about the dishes.
I think we have half our dishes out, and half in storage. Not fancy china, which we felt right off was a pointless wedding scam, but the everyday stuff, which we still have a dozen place settings of, but no kitchen or dining room big enough to realistically deploy them all.
So we have dinner, take down a couple of plates, wash them, dry them, put them back. Have soup more rarely, take down a couple of bowls–big? small?–put them back.
And this is what I sometimes worry about: do I put them back on top of the stack? Do I put the bowls back in the empty front spot on the shelf? Because if I do that, then guess which dishes are going to get reached for the next time? That’s right, the same ones.
So do I rotate them, put the dishes away at the bottom of the stack? Because the glass dessert plates are underneath the glass dessert bowls, and that means lifting the entire thing up and/or out to put the plates underneath. And the dinner plates are kind of snug under a rack that holds the salad plates, not so easy to get–anyway, I’m rationalzing now; the reality is, I don’t really rotate the dishes that much. Not as much as I feel I should.
As I was explaining this to Jean last night, after a dinner of Indian food which required the use of an extraordinary number of our big rice bowls–four–plus the kid-sized cereal bowls, I actually joked about rotating the dishes because I didn’t want the dishes underneath, or in the back, to be lonely.
But what I really think about isn’t the dishes, or even us or me, necessarily, except that it is. When I pull down and put away the same plate a couple of times a day, always from the top, I imagine what the cumulative effect of repeated use will be over the years.
Then I imagine a guy living alone, eating alone, washing and putting away his dish alone, for years. One dish accumulating the scars and scratches and chips of use, while the three, or five, or seven, or even eleven dishes below it sit untouched.
I see old china at the flea market or in a vintage store, and I imagine finding such a set, and it makes me kind of sad.
But not as sad as imagining the same guy eating and washing and drying his dishes alone, and then carefully rotating them so that they wear uniformly.
Related, and the inspiration for posting this now: Roger Ebert’s reflections on what it’s like not to eat or drink or talk anymore. [suntimes.com]

Call For Submissions: Larry Sultan Pin-Up Show At CCA

The California College for The Arts is organizing an open pin-up show to honor Larry Sultan, the photographer, conceptual artist, and teacher who passed away last month:

This show is a way for us to mark his passing and his enormous contributions and come together as a community. It is somewhat informal and open to all participants, so please feel free to forward this information. You can contribute an image, an object, a letter, text, really anything you believe honors Larry as a person, artist, and teacher. The show will be an evolving installation in the Oliver Art Center on the Oakland campus from January 11-17th, 2010. We will of course be documenting the show as it comes together.

Submissions can be via mail, email, or in person in Oakland. For details, see the full post at Conscientious.
A Show For Larry [conscientious]

‘The Most Important Unreported Stories In The Art World’

Inspired by Hans Ulrich Obrist’s perennial interview question, I wrote about artists’ unrealized projects a few years ago for the NY Times. As I stack up some [as-yet] unrealized projects of my own–including, alas, catching up on my unread e-flux journals–I’m glad to hear HUO’s still got the fire:

I see unrealized projects as the most important unreported stories in the art world. As Henri Bergson showed, actual realization is only one possibility surrounded by many others that merit close attention.13 There are many amazing unrealized projects out there, forgotten projects, misunderstood projects, lost projects, desk-drawer projects, realizable projects, poetic-utopian dream constructs, unrealizable projects, partially realized projects, censored projects, and so on. It seems urgent to remember certain roads not taken, and–in an active and dynamic, rather than nostalgic or melancholic way–transform some of them into propositions or possibilities for the future.

“Manifestos for the future”, e-flux journal #12 [e-flux.com]

Which Crystalline Minimalism?

I’m fine with somethings in the air, and zeitgeists, and influences, and inspirations, and appropriations. When I finish some of these Dutch Landscape paintings, I’ll go up to Mary Heilmann and Gerhard Richter and a dozen other folks and give them each a big ol’ hug.
But what I don’t like is thinking I’m having my own thoughts and ideas, then getting blindsided by a trend. So until I can delve a little deeper into what painter Steve DiBenedetto means here, I’m going to have to be a little pissed off with myself:

One thing led to another, and it ended up being a reference to Gothic stuff or some of this crystalline Minimalism we’re dealing with now.

Steve DiBenedetto
Breaking the ice–and the surface–with the painter.
By T.J. Carlin [timeout.com via two coats of paint]

Slight Of Hand

Considering how important and incredible the work is, it’s funny how ambivalent the Times’ Gabriel Orozco feature sounds.
Ann Temkin did a great show of Orozco’s work in Philadelphia, and yet she comes across as a bit flustered discussing the artist’s mid-career show at MoMA.
The whole Mexico/Mexican Artist thing is odd, too. Mexico is obviously an important site for Orozco’s work, but it’s just one of many. And he’s been resolute–and successful, I’d say–at not being The Mexican the art world might want him to be. [Wow, has it really been seven years since I criticized Peter Schjeldahl’s Mexican stereotyping of Orozco clay pieces at Documenta 11? ]
And the thing about painting? So many of Orozco’s classic works–and I’m thinking of things like the currency, the boarding passes and tickets, the sports photos–involve drawing and painting, this idea that painting’s somehow anathema to him and his project is baffling.
From the beginning, I’ve seen Gabriel’s work–already I realize I have to turn that thought around. The impact comes not so much from seeing Gabriel’s work, as from seeing the rest of the world differently after seeing Gabriel’s work.
The slightness of his gestures and perceptions seem like Duchampian hypotheticals, brought into the real, gritty world: how little can an artist do to make something into art? Can this coaster, this yogurt lid, any circle at all, successfully be art? And if the answer is yes, then nearly every other object or situation we encounter every day has that same potential as well.
It’s why my favorite work of his in MoMA’s collection is a 1992 drawing, or really, work on paper, where he pinched and rubbed a little raised arc at the center.
I’ll figure out some grand ending for this piece a bit later. Right now I don’t have one, which may suit me fine.
Gabriel Orozco’s Whale of a Return to MoMA [nyt]

On Remembering Ross Laycock

I’ve thought about similar situations before, so when I saw the mention in the NY Times article about all the dela Cruz’s Felix Gonzalez-Torreses I realized I was surprised at how infrequently I hear or see Felix’s partner mentioned by his full name. Turns out yesterday was the first time the Times has called him Ross Laycock, not just Ross, in the nearly twenty years since he died of AIDS-related illness.
This, despite Ross’s integral, intimate role in so much of Gonzalez-Torres’s work. Despite? Or because of? It’s partly the nature of Felix’s work, but Ross is most widely encountered [by people who didn’t meet him during his life, obviously] as an abstraction, a figure, a reflection, an absence, even, in the art work itself.
Remembering that there was far more to Ross than Felix’s artistic gestures, no matter how poignant, could convey, I Googled around a bit, and found my way to Nick Dobbing, who had been thinking very similar things for far more personal reasons.
Dobbing knew Laycock before Ross was famous, and posted a Christmas snapshot of him:

One can find pictures of Felix online easily enough, but (to my knowledge) none of Ross. I have often wondered, when people read about Ross, who is remembered mainly for being Felix’s lover, who do they think he was?
So I scanned this from an old snapshot and put it up, as a memorial.
It’s one of my most popular photographs, often revealed to others through Google searches, so I wonder if others are looking for a photograph of Ross.

Felix used several photos of Laycock in his works. Untitled (Ross and Harry) is a 1991 puzzle edition with the same dog:

Recent Photos | Ross Laycock [wovenland.ca via flickr]

A Little Lamb

The uncovered radiator was starting to seem a little dangerous in the kids’ bath, and since I had a bit of Ikea shelving left over, and a leftover can of primer turned out to match perfectly the color of my newly installed rubber floor, I took a page from Max Lamb’s Reference Library x Apartamento Magazine playbook.
And that’s how I saved $187 [$195 for a custom radiator cover, minus $8 for a pint of pink paint] and learned a nice lesson in the importance of proportion, all in one afternoon.

Gene Smith And The Jazz Loft Project

I’m diggin’ the crazy cats at WNYC and The Jazz Loft Project. After abandoning his family in Westchester, longtime LIFE photographer W. Eugene Smith wired his 6th Ave loft for sound and recorded the hell out it for several years in the 1950s. Until 1998, no one had ever listened to the 4,000+ hours of tapes in Smith’s archive. Turns out they held the conversations, practice sessions, and jam sessions, and hundreds of jazz musicians, and they captured a remarkable slice of mid-century downtown/underground New York City.
They’re up to Episode 6 right now. Ep. 7 will be about how “urban pioneers in New York’s Flower District find ways to make lofts more livable.”
Catch up with the series and check out the enticing web extras at WNYC’s Jazz Loft Project page [wnyc.org]

Umberto Eco Curates An Art Exhibit

‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’
The headline was glib enough that I waited several days before actually reading it, but Spiegel’s interview with Umberto Eco does turn out to be worth it.

SPIEGEL: But why does Homer list all of those warriors and their ships if he knows that he can never name them all?
Eco: Homer’s work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail.
SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?
Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

Interviews and breathless features about Eco are popping up everywhere because he has been a “Special Guest Curator” at the Louvre. The resulting show, ~~“The Infinity of Lists,”~~ [1] is open through Dec. 13. Previous Special Guest Curators include Robert Badinter, Toni Morrison, Anselm Kiefer and Pierre Boulez. The Special Guest Curator program is absolutely not a publicity stunt. As Jean-Marc Terrasse, Eco’s handler at the Louvre for the last two years explains in The Art Newspaper:

Umberto Eco is an ideal guest for many reasons. He is a man who has worked in all the artistic disciplines and who thinks at great speed and has thousands of very lucid ideas. He is a particularly interesting personality because he has a very clear, erudite vision of the art world, combined with a particular ability to marry high culture and pop culture, the sublime and the profane, the arcane and the new.”

The Louvre’s next Special Guest Curator is film director Patrice Chareau.
[1] Actually, the show turns out to be called “Vertige de la Liste.”