ASBC Reset
The Asynchronous Studio Book Club now has a schedule.
While I very much like the idea of Asynchronous Studio Book Club, my execution has left a lot to be desired. It hasn’t been so much asynchronous as nonsynchronous. It’s not much of a club if we’re not all working on the book at roughly the same time with some kind of foreseeable completion date.
So I did something that does not come naturally: I made a schedule.
Once we finish up with Totality in the coming weeks, we’ll start (on February 23) on The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. This has been a hugely popular book (#25 in All Books on Amazon, #1 in the Creativity category). It lists at $32 but Amazon has been selling it for $17.49, so this is a price break as well as something of an intellectual break relative to Totality.
On March 22 we’ll spend a couple of weeks with I Paint What I Want to See by Philip Guston. On April 5 we’ll begin a three-week reading of Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making by Yuriko Saito. Saito-sensei was my teacher at RISD and I’ve been looking forward to catching up with her intellectual work for a long time.
Probable candidates to follow are Paul Crowther’s The Phenomenology of Modern Art: Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style, The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield, Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, Saving Beauty by Byung-Chul Han, and to switch things up, the Mariner reissue of Calvino’s The Complete Cosmicomics. But we’ll get to April and see how we’re all doing. I’m wholly open to suggestions—two of the above titles are reader-recommended.
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We are in the midst of an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach. Obtain your copy and jump in. For future titles, see the ASBC schedule.
Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.
Preorders are available for Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard, to be published by Allworth Press on January 23, tomorrow. More information is available at the site for the book.
Ah, Matisse. Beautiful, of course, but what good is that? Serious art people want art that's disturbing and difficult (and I've heard them say it), not luxe, calme et volupté. Ultimately, you see, people should not like or enjoy art--same as with chemotherapy. Art should just make them better; that's all.