Art Is Long and Life Is Short

'[...] artists enter their ideas into the world, not just into books and art history classes.'

And it's a good thing, too.

OMIGOD. So, after about three weeks I have managed to close the cover on Jonathan Fineburg's glorious Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. I hadn't actually paid much attention to the sub-title until just now when I typed it out, but I like it. It is a text book. I made this startling discovery about 100 pages in when I had a flashback to my 5th grade history textbook, in particular a chapter on the revolutionary war. I think it's the way the captions are laid out, or maybe it's the dual columns. I'm not complaining, though. My knowledge is now immense.

It shouldn't have taken so long: 505 and five pages interspersed with nice, huge images. And my knowledge is not immense. I can, however, name all of the artists on the cover and have a whole new appreciation of exactly how much was going on in Britain and the US in the 60s (art-ly speaking). A new problem has been highlighted, though, which has to do with my critical reading skills and how little I know about anything at all at this late point in my life.

Any criticism I could make would be about how enough attention wasn't paid to feminism, for example. But it's a textbook, so all is forgiven. Mostly. There is just far too much stuff to cover. It's like the Louvre, just an impossible amount of things. Recently I went to Paris for the first time, and to the Louvre, also, for the first time. I wafted around for no less than five hours, barely stopped, and only just covered all of the ground. I refer to the ground because for every floorboard there are about five priceless somethings and on account of this congestion I couldn't tell you much about anything in there.

I don't mean to suggest that my head is like the Louvre. Far from it. If my head were a museum it would be more like Louis Tussaud's House of Wax (google it). What I am trying to say is that after four years of university study I seem to have failed to perfected a system by which I can make information stick. If at first you don't succeed, right?

Onto the next book. Spose.