A Guide to Albrecht Durer Art

Happy 200th, Charlie! I feel immersed in Charles Dickens's world and awed at how productive he was because I am reading the new biography Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin. Always short of money the first half of his life, Dickens took on an enormous amount of work writing and editing for newspapers and monthly serials with ever-looming deadlines. It makes me feel that one ought to just produce, produce, produce  without fretting too much over perfection. Sure, the deadlines, strain, and constant labor created some bad melodrama but also some wonderful characters. (What are the chances this could work for my writing?) Dickens wasn't all genius and light. Despite becoming a moral crusader publicly, I'm just getting to the scandalous part  of the biography when his personal life shows him as his worst: bullying, sacrosanct, and cruel. I have great sympathy with his wife between the constant pregnancies for over a decade and then being summonarily put aside and made fun of as fat to friends while Dickens took up with an actress. Of course, he died at 58 less than 10 years later, which shows what happens when you take up with actresses. The biography itself is excellent, but if you are feeling lazy, as I often do when staring at 400+ pages, may I recommend: Also, I'm inspired to try a Dicken's novel as it was meant to be read originally- in serial form. Or close to it. I could sit down every week and read one chapter of Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend or maybe The Pickwick Club! Any recommendations on which would be best? For more blathering about Dickens: A Tale of Two Centuries on NPRThe Guardian reviews Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life. The biography is fantastic, and evocative of Dickens's times. However, it is also this author's opinion that children today don't have the attention spans for Dickens, which I don't see as true at all. His works are quite melodramatic and meant to be read in short installments, and difficulty with the language is more one of distance than attention span.A YouTube commercial for the book with its author.

Check out my guest post on Reading Between the Lines. I discuss "swoon-worthy" author Jeffrey Eugenides' new book The Marriage Plot as it compares to his novel Middlesex, and I ponder many other questions relating to the author.

Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, Sanja IvekovićGod, I love the atrium at MoMA. Sure, it's not where Ivekovic originally intended her sculpture Lady Rosa of Luxembourg to stand. But where else can you put a 69-foot obelisk? Aside from in Luxembourg that is. More about the exhibition Sweet Violence here and about Lady Rosa here. Installation view, Luxembourg, 2001

"Untitled" (Placebo), Felix Gonzales-Torres, 2001 I highly recommend it right now. I went to MoMA slightly hungry, battled the crowds and opted to tour the contemporary galleries rather than face the masses in the permanent collection or new Diego Rivera exhibition. I chose well. In the shimmering installation by Felix Gonzales-Torres, visitors are invited to take a piece of candy from the pile which is eventually replenished. It is slowly depleted, to be refilled later, and was created after the artist's partner died of AIDS-related complications in 1991. Continuing on, the art gets better in terms of fullness. Not only did I get a piece of silver-wrapped candy, but I was next served green curry. Curry from Untitled (Free/Still), Rirkrit Tiravanija, 1992Yes, that's right. I stood in line for a bowl of very decent green curry in a section of the gallery turned into a room-like space by a plywood frame and temporary walls and furniture. Rirkrit Tiravanija's piece Untitled (Free/Still) first went up in 1992 at 303 Gallery, and the museum recently acquired it. You can check it out from noon to 3 p.m. most days through February 8. Food as a medium in an installation or performance is something I feel I've seem more of in the past few years. Jennifer Rubell for instance has done some notable performance/installations involving food, like thecheese head at the Brooklyn Museum of Art or the more recent Art Basel Miami breakfast. However her works never seem nearly as appetizing as what's at MoMA now. Also check out: Five for Friday: Works that Look Good Enough to... for more of the museum's edible works.