Oh snap!

From André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism:

If the purely informative style, of which the sentence just quoted is a prime example, is virtually the rule rather than the exception in the novel form, it is because, in all fairness, the author’s ambition is severely circumscribed. The circumstantial, needlessly specific nature of each of their notations leads me to believe that they are perpetrating a joke at my expense. I am spared not even one of the character’s slightest vacillations: will he be fairhaired? what will his name be? will we first meet him during the summer? So many questions resolved once and for all, as chance directs; the only discretionary power left me is to close the book, which I am careful to do somewhere in the vicinity of the first page. And the descriptions! There is nothing to which their vacuity can be compared; they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him about the clichés:

The small room into which the young man was shown was covered with yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums in the windows, which were covered with muslin curtains; the setting sun cast a harsh light over the entire setting…. There was nothing special about the room. The furniture, of yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an oval table opposite the sofa, a dressing table and a mirror set against the pierglass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etchings of no value portraying some German girls with birds in their hands – such were the furnishings. (Dostoevski, Crime and Punishment)



I am in no mood to admit that the mind is interested in occupying itself with such matters, even fleetingly. It may be argued that this school-boy description has its place, and that at this juncture of the book the author has his reasons for burdening me. Nevertheless he is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room.


(I have to admit that the reason this passage first caught my eye is that an ex who I now greatly despise was in love with Dostoevski. hahahhahaha)

Your daily moment of zen.

I am making flashcards for my comprehensive exam which is in less than two weeks.
I love Grünewald's Isenheim Alterpiece. I'm mad at myself for not making more of an effort to take a train out to Colmar when I was in Paris to see it in person.

Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Alterpiece (First View), c.1510-15

Glass + Steel.

An art exhibit installation isn't truly finished until one has accrued a significant number of bruises.















It's always worth it, though. Go check out Glass + Steel at Elmhurst Art Museum.

The things you stumble upon...

This was posted a few days ago on a blog I follow, Old Paint, which posts an old painting every day. I love it, and it opens up a whole new avenue of study for my thesis: examples of adolescents in Italian paintings.

Felice Casorati, Girl on a Red Carpet, 1912

It's like one of Balthus's girls set in an Eduoart Vuillard painting.

I'm being crushed under glass and steel.

Funnily, my latest curatorial endeavor makes me appreciate school so much more and I actually miss being a full time grad student working on 15-20 page papers spending all of my free time reading essays. Not that I don't still have museum aspirations, but I think I'll be much better at it after I finish my degree. Also, I will be able and more qualified to do it full time, and thus will not feel like a total fuck up even though I know it's not entirely my fault.
Despite it all, the exhibit looks great and is different than anything EAM's done before, and I'm now more prepared to deal with the next exhibit which I foresee as being similarly taxing. No more doormat curating.

I just got Anthropologie's latest catalogue in the mail and I want every pair of shoes depicted in it. Though I think it's kind of stupid that "For our August edition, we photographed what inspires us...
real people
real places
you"

Then they show people modeling their clothes in Paris, New York, and London.
Yep, that's me.