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Art Is Artisanal
AI’s incursion into art-making raises the question, What defines the artist’s skill set? Artists are artisans and art is artisanal. Building on this, consider six qualities of art’s artisanal-ness and how AI fails to achieve them. Art-making is by hand. Playing music, writing, painting, dancing, cooking—art contains and expresses traces of the body that made Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: “The World According to David Hockney” (2024)
“New ideas often seem to go against common sense” (57). “You can’t have art without play. Even a scientist has a sense of play. And that allows for surprises, the unexpected” (69). “Painters must, to a certain extent, analyze their work afterwards. I’m sure the Cubists didn’t plan it, they didn’t down and say, ‘Well, Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Tom Thomson, Hot Summer Moonlight (1915) Debussy, Images, Livre II, Et la lune descends sur la temple qui fut (1907). In the early 1990s I spent the evenings of one summer typing up book notes for my mom, who had returned to graduate school to pursue a PhD in English literature. (Her dissertation used psychoanalytic Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: James Wood’s “Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997–2019” (2020)
“…his essay ‘Music Discomposed’, the philosopher Stanley Cavell says that the critic’s first gesture is: ‘You have to hear it.’ Why, he asks, do you have to hear it? Because, he says, with a deliberate risk of tautology, ‘if I don’t hear it, I don’t know it’, and works of art are ‘objects of the Continue reading
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Brett’s Book Picks: Stewart Brand’s “Maintenance of Everything” (2026) and C. Thi Nguyen’s “The Score” (2026)
Stewart Brand, Maintenance of Everything C. Thi Nguyen, The Score Continue reading
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Change One Thing
Paul Klee, Ancient Sound (1925) “The key about a process is that it has time in it.” – Nassim Taleb, Fooled By Randomness When I’m writing new music I sometimes preserve one thing from a previous project, but change it slightly. Let’s say I’ve just finished a work for solo keyboard. Usually what happens is Continue reading
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