The world’s going to hell. I’ve got a deadline piece I’m stuck on. And my Google Voice number is set to expire unless I use it. So there’s no better time to put out a call for you to call in and share a bit of art-related writing or text that’s sticking with you right now.
When I first tried this exercise last spring, I thought it’d be a great way to find amazing or thought-provoking writing people have been saving up. But I also found it a good way to share something as I came across it, just placing a quick call, and leaving a voicemail. So.
Call the greg.org voicemail at 34-SOUVENIR (347-688-3647) and leave a message with: * your name or handle [optional], * you reading one brief art-related text [e.g., a sentence or two, 200 hundred or so words, a paragraph max, not a whole thing] * the writer and source.
You can quote yourself, and if you’re sitting on a gold mine of great texts, you can call more than once, but please keep it to one quote per call. And no slop, bots or twitter.
When I get enough recordings, I’ll compile them into one mixtape and put it out here. So your recording may be used [unless it’s hateful or absolutely sucks, obv, editor’s call], but any other info goes nowhere and nothing is done with it.
Call 34-SOUVENIR today, tonight, whenever you read something good.
Bookforum recently emailed some links to read up on in advance of its Fall 2025 issue. On the list: Gene Seymour’s Summer 2017 review of James Baldwin: The FBI File, William J. Maxwell’s deep dive into the declassified records of the FBI’s most extensive surveillance of a Black writer. Maxwell would know, after publishing a survey of the US government’s investigations of Black literary figures in 2015, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature.
What stuck out from Maxwell’s second book is Baldwin’s response to discovering in 1963 that he and the Civil Rights Movement leaders in Selma, Alabama were all being monitored by the FBI, surveilled by agents of their own country’s government, but not protected when other agents of the state attacked them. Baldwin announced, publicly and repeatedly, that his bestselling novel, Another Country (1962), his next book was going to be about Hoover and the FBI, and their central role in America’s “race problem.”
There’s evidence throughout the book that Baldwin gave back to the FBI as good as he got, baiting the easily baitable Hoover by declaring in a 1963 television interview that the director “was part of the problem in the civil rights movement.”
The book obviously didn’t happen, but it’s not clear whether Baldwin ever meant for it to, either. Was he actually was working on the book, titled The Blood Counters, or did he use the looming possibility of such an exposé as a taunt and a feint for his FBI adversaries? Maxwell traces the documentation of the FBI’s frantic efforts to find out, and to, if possible, prevent its publication.
Maxwell seems to make as much effort to present The Blood Counters as a conceptual vaporware meant to bait Hoover personally as he does on the idea that this far-reaching surveillance, involving dozens of agents and even more informants reporting from wherever Baldwin traveled or spoke, was actually a personal contest of wills between these two men. It might, in retrospect, be more useful to look at how many eager collaborators the FBI found in New York’s publishing industry, and what actual books they successfully spiked, or writers they successfully silenced.
Maxwell notes a diminished output for Baldwin in 1964, which may have represented lost work on The Blood Counters. Or maybe it was just the stress of living under government surveillance. The Blood Counters was the story Baldwin had to tell in order to live, but it’s not clear if he was telling it to himself, or just to his official menacers.
And now this all feels remarkably quaint and humane in the face of an unresrained digital dragnet that logs your DMs and knows exactly how far you haven’t gotten in your Google Docs draft.
Actually, they start by lamenting the lack of issues or consensus of “ideas the community of artists was grappling with,” and then they go deep into what turns out to have been one of those big ideas: image vs. object, and the specific physical, psychological, and emotional experience an artwork can elicit. Which, it turns out, it intrinsic to how both artists work:
Jonathan Main has died. Main ran a bookshop in South London called The Bookseller Crow On The Hill, a person and a store beloved by the community that formed around them.
I mention it because I did not realize until now that Main was also the blogger who, in 2010, noticed that Penguin Modern Classics had stripped out the first section of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Written as a fictional foreword by pyschologist John Ray, Jr., PhD, the section is the frame for the entire story.
Main published his blog on TypePad, which recently announced it would be discontinuing its platform, and deleting everything hosted there. Main’s blog, at least, is preserved by the Internet Archive, while the rest of us can keep the memory of his lolwtf discover alive.
Luis Jiménez, Man on Fire, 1969, fiberglass in acrylic urethane resin, like 9 ft tall, installed in “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum”
In June I did a whirlwind survey of almost all the museums, art and otherwise, in Washington, D.C., and wrote about it for ARTnews. It’s in their latest print issue, and it just dropped online.
For a series of museums I’ve been visiting for years, it was a repeatedly revelatory experience. Luis Jiménez’s Man on Fire is a case in point, a stunning sculpture that stands between the columns of the Smithsonian’s Old Patent Building at the flaming center of “The Shape of Power,” the first exhibition singled out for criticism in a presidential executive order.
And I felt the urgency of the decades and centuries of work, both in art and history, and in the museums’ presentation, study, and care of these objects. We’ll get a more perfect union yet, but let’s not destroy the imperfect one we have on the way.
Barnett Newman’s Uriel, 1955, 8 x 18 ft, installed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021 by the grace of its new owner, and photographed there by blogger Tocho T8
“There is one more story that properly belongs to the period of Newman’s hardest struggles. In 1968, during the social and political events and dialogue, the publisher of Horizon Books asked Newman if he could publish a volume of his essays, notes, and statements. Newman replied that he would prefer it if Horizon would republish Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, and that he would write an introduction, in the hope of making a contribution to the dialogue going on within the Left. Horizon agreed, and in Newman’s introduction he allowed himself only one small personal digression:
In the ’40s, when artists got together of an evening, there was always someone who insisted on playing surrealist games. I recall one evening when everyone in the room had to say what destroyed him. I remember what I said. I said that I felt destroyed by established institutions. I was surprised to hear one of the artists present say that what destroyed him were people. He was perhaps wiser than I, for I had to go through that Darwinian lesson. Looking back, I think we were both right, because only those people practice destruction and betrayal who hunger to accept completely the values of the establishment in which they seek a place. It’s the establishment that makes people predatory.
Uriel was purchased in 2021 by Ken Griffin, in a deal organized by James Meyer and Iwan Wirth, for an undisclosed nine-figure price.
There’s a lot going on in the July/August issue of The Brooklyn Rail. A bunch of people respond to Bob Nickas’ obituary/autopsy of the contemporary, which has apparently been dead art walking lo, these 25 years.
I think Rhea Anastas’ argument is useful, that the frame of the contemporary, and the art industry and auction and product trends associated with it have obscured the view of the art in our midst.
Bernardo Daddi, The Virgin Mary with Saints Thomas Aquinas and Paul (det.), ca. 1335, Getty Museum. [L] prior to the Getty’s acquisition; [R] after the Getty’s removal of the baby, via The Brooklyn Rail
In her fascinating and sobering Irving Sandler Essay, conservator Annika Svendsen Finne looks at a controversial 1993 acquisition by the Getty of a 14th century gold ground painting of the Madonna by Bernardo Daddi, “contingent upon the removal of a large painted baby from the work’s surface, which had been added by a later artist.”
Svendsen Finne looks back across the mere decades since the baby’s erasure; at the reflections of the conservators involved; at other contemporary examples of the genre; and the interpretive advances of art historians since, and wonders if maybe the Getty should have slowed their roll, and recognized the constraints of context of their own decisions.
Look, the 21st century’s been rough on everyone, including art. It does sound like it’d be better, though, if we just step back for a minute before throwing it all out. A minute, or a generation, whichever.
Thanks to everyone who called in, and who shared the word about this little audio experiment, which I’ve called an anthology, a compilation, and now a mixtape. Phone It In, Vol. 1 [mp3] is also a reading list, with sources and links to the included quotes. As you’ll see from the playlist below, there are some classics, some fresh finds, and even a breaking news story.
Whatever it is, if you come across some art-related writing that sticks with you for whatever reason, please call and share a bit of it at 34-SOUVENIR, and I’ll bundle those up, too, and put them out here.
As I was putting the tracks together, I discovered that when I first downloaded the calls, I’d accidentally overwritten Carolina Miranda’s call over everyone who called after her. And for a minute I thought, her call is such a mic drop, I really should just go with that. Instead, I moved it to the end, one of the only chronological shifts in the compilation. [Miranda’s cold open is a lol clapback to my voicemail greeting, which I shortened from a full explanation of the project to “Whadja find??”]
Miranda’s quote, from Annie-B Parson, really laid bare the unspoken essence of what I was hoping for here: not just favorite line, or a moment of memorable or powerful writing, but something that you read now that had an impact now.
It feels like an impossible ask, or at least a daunting one, but I really wanted to hear examples, even snippets, where art-related writing mattered in this dire af moment. I think everyone came through, and I am psyched and grateful.
[10/2025 UPDATE: Lines are open, collecting texts for another volume]
What’s a bit of art writing that you loved? That stuck with you? That made you think? That made you cringe? That made you want to see something? That made you want to say something? Something in a review? A critique? An essay? A blog post? A social media post? A press release? An auction catalogue? A wall text?
If you read an amazing, short piece of art-related writing recently, why not hold up to the light, so we can all marvel at it together?
Call the greg.org voicemail at 34-SOUVENIR (347-688-3647) and leave a message with: * your name or handle [optional], * you reading one brief art-related text [e.g., a sentence or two, 200 hundred or so words, a paragraph max, not the whole thing] * the writer and source.
You can quote yourself, and if you’re sitting on a gold mine of great texts, you can call more than once, but please keep it to one quote per call. And no slop, bots or twitter.
When I get enough, I’ll edit them together and post a compilation here with links to the sources. Will that be in a day? A week? A month? Never because the idea of making a voice call is ridiculous? I have no idea!
So your recording may be used [unless it’s hateful or absolutely sucks, obv, editor’s call], but any other info goes nowhere and nothing is done with it.
For mine I’m gonna go with either a couple of lines from My night with Cy, the notes Tacita Dean made while spending the night in the Menil’s Twombly galleries, which are inserted in Cy Dear, her new book from the Menil & MACK books, or nine words I could never have imagined before, and which I now can’t imagine being without: “This copy of Ulysses belongs to me, Marsden Hartley.”
[NEXT MORNING UPDATE: After living with this expectation for a few hours, I see that it cannot be a crowdsourced panning for art writing gold, which is anxious and stressful. Instead, I’m treating it as a note to myself, a way to mark, remember, and share a good quote or idea as I find them. So if you read something that makes you think, stop, lol, or smdh, take a second and share it by calling 34-SOUVENIR.]
Our oldest had to read Mansfield Park in 9th grade and very much did not like it, and so I’ve avoided it. Until I heard poet Dionne Brand talking about it with David Naimon on the Tin House podcast, Between The Covers. [youtube] Brand’s latest book, Salvage: Readings From The Wreck, is a forensic return to a whole host of “classic” texts, including Austen’s Mansfield Park, that find Blackness where it has been omitted by the structures of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. But Brand goes beyond literary analysis to question the function of a novel, and how forms of writing—and thus thinking—perpetuate and protect the structures that spawned them.
[Dionne Brand] I’m rereading these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. When these texts were written, they were done so self-consciously as colonial objects. If they were being made as aesthetic objects, they were for the European bourgeoisie. In fact, these texts were created and encouraged because they told readers about the wonderful life that slave-owning, the eradication of Indigenous peoples, and violence allowed.
[Saidiya Hartman] I really like that formulation: to reread these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. Salvage clearly articulates the ways in which a colonial project, a settler project, even when it does not announce itself explicitly and politically, finds refuge in the categories of the aesthetic and the beautiful.
Even if I hadn’t heard Brand’s conversation, I like to think I’d have spotted the glaring anxieties of capitalism that obsess almost every character in Mansfield Park, as well as the many references to Antigua and, thus, the direct dependence on plantation slavery of the family’s fortunes—and their entire world. I’m only halfway through, and this book [Austen obv] is grim as hell.
Brand’s not through, though. Her and Hartman’s discussion of photography, visual art, aesthetics, and beauty continues to work away in my mind.
[meanwhile, in case you needed any evidence that this conversation happened in September: “Soon that phrase will be outlawed in the States. (laughter)“
I’d seen Issey Miyake’s 132 5 Project clothes, but not the lamps. Now here is a lamp.
In 2010 Miyake and his Reality Lab groupies developed a collection of one-piece of recycled polyester textile, geometric origami-based garments, paying as much attention to how they looked folded flat as to how they worked on a body. Like his Pleats Please and APOC (A Piece Of Cloth) concepts, 123 5 was an experiment with material, process, and form without too much concern for how it looked on, because it always just looks like: whatever, you’re wearing Miyake.
[Looking now for an image to post, I can also say it didn’t matter to Miyake how it looked on a mannequin, in a photo, in a store, or what a press release said. The charitable explanation is that it privileges the physical experience with the product.]
Anyway, Miyake brought this folding-focused concept into a lighting collection at Artemide called IN-EI. Typically written as In’ei (陰翳), Miyake told Artemide it means “shadow, shadiness, nuance.” But the term is most directly associated with 陰翳礼讃 (In’ei Raisan), “In Praise of Shadows,” Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s foundational 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics, which had a huge influence on Japan’s own sense of cultural exceptionalism vis à vis the Modernism of the West.
Another reference that is very unmentioned is Isamu Noguchi’s Akari series, which brought a modernist and modernizing sensibility to Japan’s long tradition of paper lanterns. Many of which also fold flat, obviously. My long-simmering fixation with the Akari arc from lamps to “light sculptures” is probably what made me notice this lamp in the first place. And seeing the stacked rhombus lamps in this Miyake boutique, it’s clear Noguchi was on Artemide’s mind, too.
Artemide and Issey Miyake, making sure “Each lampshade is created using 2 or 3D mathematic principals” since this pic was taken the NYC store in 2012. It was even stenciled on the wall lmao.
However long this cruise ship napkin-shaped table lamp was in production, I don’t know, but the IN-EI Collection currently only has four pieces in it, and this is currently not one of them. Its name, Hoshigame, translates as star tortoise, and yes, its shape does look like the shell of a Burmese Star Tortoise. So maybe in 2015, when the Kemono Friends manga dropped, and an Indian Star Tortoise was among the exotic animals in the magic zoo that turned into kawaii little girls, Artemide decided to quietly excuse itself from the search results.
As long as you know to search for Hoshigame, though, you will not need to rush to buy this one in Paris. Turns out they’re all over the place, at prices ranging from etsy cheap to 1st dibs ridiculous.
March 12, 2014, 12:20 PM: I swear, every one of these still lands this week, and lands different.
I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about twitter and social media for fifteen years, and the only thing I can come up with is, start a blog.
Whatever else it is, Twitter has been a source of language fascination for me. To see or share combinations of words of unexpected beauty, sublimity, stupidity, and criminality. I developed a practice of tweeting stuff without explanation or context–without original context, since the whole point was to hold up an object of text, or later, an image, or a combination of both, and present it in the context of the Twitter feed itself–that annoyed tf out of some people. I really tried to approach Twitter as an experiment, to see what would happen, or what worked and what didn’t. As time went on, Twitter’s own conventions coalesced, and even came to dominate information in the world, far beyond its own users’ spheres.
But that’s not important right now. One thing I started to do was to find meaning or resonance in groupings of tweets. Because they were in my timline, coming from people I’d chosen to follow, the synchronicities between adjacent tweets weren’t exactly random, but the more random and unrelated they seemed, the better. The connection didn’t need to be glaringly obvious, either, but an unusual, mundane word appearing in three unrelated tweets was as awesome as two rhyming images.
I developed rules for groupings: adjacency was a must; longer chains of tweets beat a pair; no retweets or manipulations by me. But in practice, I’d just screenshot’em all and figure I’d sort’em out later. And sometimes, when they ended up next to a gem, I couldn’t resist including my own tweets.
These groupings were made by others and me, and yet it seemed the only intentionality was in the finding. There was the sense, or perhaps the alluring suggestion, that beyond illuminating the contours of my own curatorial decisions, the groupings offered glimpses of a larger, unintended, collective meaning, like generative glitches in a (not the) matrix.
I tweeted some of these out as I’d find them, just a blip in the stream, but then I decided to collect them, to see what they could do together. So I started a tumblr, and after two tedious weeks of trying to capture the metadata embedded in each multitweet screenshot, I shelved it. But the screenshots have kept piling up.
Now with the actual destruction of Twitter looming, these shards feel possibly more relevant than they did, and so I’ve dusted off the tumblr and will keep posting these nice groupings, worrying less that they conform to my own arbitrary notions of multi-tweet poetic form, and instead being glad that they exist at all.
For no other reason than I can, here is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby with every mention of Gatsby replaced by Greg. I should read this again; it has been a while.
