The Artist is Superfluous? Books and Art

Rockery plant

A book reviewed in the Royal Academy magazine No. 119 Summer 2013 'Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions That Made Art History 1962-2002' charts the progression of art in the past fifty years to the point where (to quote the art critic of the New Yorker) ' the artist is superfluous'. This book is the second in a series by Phaidon that starts in volume one with the Salon des Refuses in Paris in 1863.

Red trike and sunflower

At the V&A, an exhibition entitled Memory Palace celebrates the narrative world of author Hari Kunzru http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Kunzru, visualized by a series of commissions by internationally acclaimed illustrators, graphic designers and typographers.

Here in Annandale and Eskdale, we are asked to contribute Sept 6-9 to Dumfries and Galloway's Environmental Art Festival that runs from June to October this year. Any ideas? 

Pollen

Pollen at Craigieburn Garden, Moffat D&G

To a free performance last night of Pollen, part of a tour for Spring Fling 2013 by the Golden Girls, Alex Rigg and musicians at Craigieburn just outside Moffat. The garden has never looked lovelier, and the Buddhist prayer flags made the ritualistic mysterious performance seem like a new Rite of Spring or an interlude from The Tempest.

Today is the birthday of Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote, as a lapsed Baptist minister, in his monograph Nature: 

'.. floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?'