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Tag: Death

Alex Chilton Died Last Night

Published March 18, 2010

Rothko is dead, we get to see Jeff Koons.
Kerouac is dead, now we read books by JK Rowling.
Alex Chilton is dead, now we listen to Lady Gaga.

We have lost.

I wouldn’t consider myself a friend of Alex’s – I‘ve met him about a dozen times – a drink, a smile, a “Hey, y’all ah right?” that was about it. It was more than I ever wanted and far more than I had a right to. Because while meeting him was great – it was always about the music for me. I still have that, and that’s fine. But like anyone, I would have liked to have heard one more song.

One more sloppy, barely held together, heartbreaking, amazing song. Warts and all. He did that better than anyone.

Rock on, Butch.

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In Artforum no less…

Published March 7, 2010

Sarah K. Rich made my day yesterday when I sat down to read a bit of the recent Artforum. Unfortunately it sometimes takes someone’s death to trigger a critical response about recent trends and ideas that seem to be on the way towards canonization. In her obituary for Kenneth Noland, Ms. Rich starts with an assumption that she finds (happily) to be false about the preciousness of an art object once Mr. Noland has finished, as well as the energetic physical engagement towards his finished art object.

Let me cut to the chase here; The part of this article that impresses me – and gives me hope for future critics and curators is this:

“Now that we are several decades down the hill of popular culture, and we’ve all gotten a better idea of how frenzied and mind-numbing kitsch can be, the formalist advocacy of work that might give the viewing subject a place for the exercise of sustained and quiet attention doesn’t seem like a bad idea.”

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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Nat Finkelstein has died

Published October 23, 2009

Nat Finkelstein was best known for his memorable chronicling of Andy Warhol’s Factory (primarily the first and Second factories).“I stayed at the Factory from 1964 till 1967,” Finkelstein told an interviewer in 2001. Then later, “I watched pop die and punk being born.”

His photographs of Warhol, the Velvet Underground and all of the superstars of the factory are primarily the visual record that we have of “The Warhol Sixties”.

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Jim Carroll died this weekend

Published September 14, 2009

I came to know of Jim Carroll via the book The Basketball Diaries, not unlike everyone else I was going to school with at VCU in the very early eighties. Truth is, TBD is a fun read – not unlike Trainspotting is a fun movie. (irony intended)

It wasn’t until I started reading his poetry that I really started to understand how interesting an artist he really was. I still read his work and will miss the fact that I wont be able to read what he might have produced in the future.

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JG Ballard has died.

Published April 19, 2009

I guess no one else thinks today should be a holiday. Ballard was known for a few novels by the mainstream press, Empire of the Sun was probably the most famous.

For me, he changed the way I think and look at the everyday world around me. I read three novels of his back-to-back-to-back and radically changed what I made as art and how I thought about art, sex and our political system. Those books were; High-Rise, Crash, and Concrete Island.

It wasn’t that these books were shocking in an accusatory way, it was that they were so matter of fact in a “this is how it’s going to be sort of way” – problem was, they were mostly dead on accurate.

Martin Amis wrote: “Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different – a disused – part of the reader’s brain.” The trouble is, after reading and thinking about the work – those parts of the brain start to get used. To great effect, I have rarely met someone who has read Ballard and has not struck me as someone I should know better.

In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard hailed Crash as the first great novel of the universe of simulation. That praise alone should send you either running towards or running away from JG Ballards writing.

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