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It was so sad and very scary.
But its hard to even imagine that far into the future; now seems so brutal and constantly present.
This masterpiece extends the entire length of one of Gagosians grand palaces.
Walker gives us Obama as mythic figure, not a man.
All of these shows now sit empty as do hundreds of others in galleries and museums.
I havent even mentioned the jewel of a show at Andrew Edlin of little-seen American visionary Karla Knight.
Or the beautiful 1930s and 1940s visions of Agnes Pelton at the Whitney.
Galleries and museums have gone dark all over the world.
And will stay like that, probably, for some time.
No one knows what the economic damages will be, or how totally the art world will be remade.
Prices skyrocketed at the top, megagalleries mushroomed, and all the rest.
Perhaps, whole small art scenes will be economically wiped out.
Either way, many who work in and around art will lose jobs and health insurance.
Art will go on.
All we know is that everything is different; we dont know how, only that it is.
The unimaginable is now reality.
Arts primary metaphysical building blockisthat which has never been imagined.
This is why I can say and know that art will go on.
This is because art is the ability to embed the unimaginable in material.
Creativity is a survival strategy; its in every bone in our bodies, and always has been.
He was emphatic that survival isnt of the strongest or the most intelligent.
So tragic he was misread this way.
Darwin said that survival depended on those most adaptive to change.
Thats what art does, maybe better than anything!
This is the built-in reason that art is constantly changing itself.
I actually think art might be using us to reproduce and evolve itself.
Art is all of these things.
And it always has been, because those things are part of each of us.
Pleasure is a form of knowledge.
The decorative is a force, a creative force.
So are all the rest of those supposedly shallow values.
Even Goyas Saturn Devouring His Son was painted to decorate a dining room.
All these objects are complex forms of beauty.
We may now ask: Can art change the world?
In respect to those suffering and about to suffer, we must say no.
However, artdoeschange lives, and lives can change the world.
Its just part of the whole ball of wax.
But it can help, too.
My whole day changed.
I feel it still.
Many galleries and museums are trying to make art available online.
Let the New Museum post videos of its wild Peter Saul show.
Maybe things will be different in two years when we reemerge battered and bruised.
If I live, I may have written more obituaries than I will want to remember.
We did this during AIDS, and it was shattering.
(Look at the current U.S. political administration.)
This is what happened after September 11.
Many of us initially thought that everything was different, even if we didnt know how.
It turned out that the same forces leading up to 9/11 began driving culture more.
We saw the Bush-Cheney War Machine and Flint, Michigan.
Coronavirus feels very different than 9/11 much bigger, more mysterious, terrifying, and far-reaching.
Whether we change or not, things are being changed by forces beyond our control.
All we know is that viruses come but viruses also go.
