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Notes On No
Agnes Martin, With My Back to the World (1997) No ClickbaitNo CollabsNo CommentsNo Content CreatorsNo EngagementNo Five Things You Should KnowNo FollowsNo HacksNo Hot TakesNo InfluencersNo LikesNo Links In The DescriptionNo LivestreamingNo MerchNo MetricsNo Notification BellsNo RecommendationsNo ShoutoutsNo Smash That Subscribe ButtonNo Sponsored ContentNo Thumbs UpNo ThumbnailsNo Unboxings Continue reading
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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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