LAWRENCE RUSS: Soul, Art, and Society
Archives: Art in Society
Lonely Truth versus the Chill of Ages
There’s a loneliness in being an artist, a feeling that almost no one else understands or values what you’ve intended or made. There’s loneliness in having had any kind of mystical experience, an ache in believing that you’ve gained something of great importance, but that you cannot open it to anyone else. And there’s a […]
Prominence
I’ve titled this image “Prominence.” Every word has an infinite number of meanings that depend, in part, on the context of its usage and the capacities of the one who receives it. “Prominence,” for instance, has a physical, spatial meaning. It has a societal meaning. And it can, more uncommonly, relate to comparative importance or […]
Windows and Doors and Waves and the Well
“[The] notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would […]
Suspicious Minds: My Farewell and Regrets, for President Obama
With President Obama’s imminent departure from office in mind, I thought of a photograph that I’d taken back in 2003, before I’d ever heard the name “Barack”: “Mr. Lincoln’s Sympathy Viewed with Suspicion.” If I’ve ever captured what Cartier-Bresson called a “decisive moment” (when “one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart [join] on the same […]
Alligator Intellect
[The ink painting above, by Sengai, pictures a scene from the famous Zen koan in which the Zen teacher, Nan-ch’uan, tells his students that he will chop the kitten in half if none of them can say immediately whether reality is (a) objective or (b)subjective. This picture and the one at the end of this […]
Irony and Fashion
Irony: don’t let yourself be controlled by it, particularly when you are not actually writing. In the moments when you are are, try to use it as one more means of getting at life. When irony is used as a pure instrument of thought, it is pure, and there is no need to be ashamed […]
The Terror of the Naked Critic – Part 2 of 2
Mr. Grundberg has credentials to burn, including years of writing reviews for The New York Times and various awards, including the prestigious Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography. Part of what made this case exceptional was that Grundberg was being called upon to judge a photographer who did not himself come packed in […]
The Terror of the Naked Critic – Part 1 of 2
The comic bit, on which there’ve been many variations,goes something like this: A Hollywood pitchman addresses a group of studio execs, exhorting them, “I’m tellin’ you this project is box office gold! It’s like Godzilla meets Terms of Endearment!” We’re supposed to smirk at the crassness of the agent’s tactic, at the “jurors’” implicit fear […]
The Frailty of Judges and Critics
Ever since caveman-times, no doubt, people have tended to huddle around communal fires for warmth, for mutual comfort, for survival. We would all like the support and good will of our fellows. But if we covet those things too much, we betray ourselves, we fear being too original or honest, we shun certain people or […]
Cast a Cold Eye on Acceptance, on Rejection. Artist, Pass By!
Okay, forgive me. I’ve “borrowed” and recast this title from the short poem that W.B. Yeats wrote for his tombstone: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!” You know, when you’ve been the greatest 20th-Century poet writing in English, there’s at least a decent chance that the epitaph you […]