I have a drawing exhibition opening tonight. Like most artists facing an opening, I feel a mix of excitement and dread. What if I walk in the room and all the drawings have been framed upside down? What if I suddenly hate all of them? What if this, and what if that? “I’m thrilled” plays ball in my head with “Let’s just get this over with.”

Actors and musicians have openings all the time. They have their first opening night, which must be particularly nerve-racking, but after that, surely they get used to the butterflies. Performance art of any kind requires this strength, at the very least. Besides, performance artists thrive off the applause of their audiences.

But artists are entirely different. We live in our studios for hours, days, months and even years with no one seeing what we do. We’re not performers. We like a certain distance to be maintained between ourselves and the work...

Last night I sat around waiting for trick-or-treaters. None came to my door. Not that I was really surprised. In New York, parents generally take their kids in and out of the stores, which offer candy to all the adorably greedy little ones. Even so, I had bought a plump bag of bite-size MilkyWays so I’d be ready. I guess I’ll just have to eat them myself.

Waiting around for trick-or-treaters got me thinking about Halloween, and from there, to ruminating, for the umpteenth time in my life, on religion. Halloween is one of those holidays Christianity appropriated (religions on the rise do well when they take over beliefs already in place and merely modify them to fit their own idea). Yet even though Halloween has become secular (save for Wiccans and the like), its inherent paganism shines through. Set in autumn (the end of the harvest and well into the dying of the light) and marked by...

First, thank you to The Chronicle's Brainstorm editors for publishing news about my drawing exhibition. I was both surprised and delighted to see the post!

Here I'd like to tell a little tale about how sometimes big government bureaucrats are the solution.

I first experienced vertical life -- i.e., living in a residence in a tall building rather than living in a one- or two-story house -- when I moved to New York. The first loft my husband and I rented was a third-floor artist’s loft -- a walkup (no elevator) with slanting steps as steep as the flat side of the Matterhorn. At the time, we had a baby, no money, and -- fathom this -- no washer and dryer. (Laundromat days were especially fun.)

Twenty years ago we moved into the fifth-floor loft we now inhabit. This time, the building had an elevator. It was old, and it broke down a lot, but elevators are to cities what local county roads...

In today’s New York Times, there’s an article telling us about how one Ms. Tiffany Block, age 28, landed a $13-an-hour job as an administrative assistant at a truck-driving school in Indiana, beating out almost 500 other applicants. With so many applicants possessing good qualifications, all of them hungry for employment, the company had a difficult task sorting through all the applicants and settling on the precious few whom they would interview. In the end, they selected eight for an interview. Each of the finalists was then subjected to an hour-long, one-on-one interview, consisting of 100 questions.

How did Ms. Block win this job? What led to her success? The article suggests the usual reasons—such as how luck played its part, and how those who were doing the hiring wanted someone with experience, but not too much experience. Chris Kelsey, the school’s director, said they “like to...

I came of age when the “f-word” first started entering ordinary conversation among educated people. Although The New York Times still won’t print it, The New Yorker will. The word is now so ubiquitous and ordinary that it’s lost most of its shock value. Most of the time, it barely manages to register, let alone make a point. It remains vulgar, but since the educated and the elite of today adore vulgarity, who cares?

In high school during the 1960s, I never heard the f-word said out loud, although I knew it existed, of course. I'm sure I must have heard it whispered at slumber parties -- and even whispered it myself -- although I can’t say I remember any occasions in particular. In the 10th grade, I stumbled across Tropic of Cancer on a bookshelf in my older sister’s room, and devoured it there and then.

The juniors and seniors I met during my first semester of college shocked me with...

In my last post, I offered a jokey little midterm exam making fun of “grade grubbing” -- particularly the situation of students who think that with the right amount of properly applied whining and cajoling, a professor will cave and change a grade of “B” into “A.” I’d like to revisit the subject, only this time in all seriousness.

There’s some merit to the complaints of those who consider grading in the humanities -- compared to the hard sciences and mathematics -- to be extremely subjective around the edges. Standards in the humanities are not as hard and fast as those in science and mathematics, and professors find it harder to quantify what is essentially a matter of quality. The standards often seem mushy. Even so, more than one colleague in the hard sciences and mathematics has assured me that grade grubbing knows no bounds. They, too, have had to listen to the appeals of students ...

FA 101
"Grade-grubbing in the Modern University," Fall 2009
Midterm Exam
Professor Fendrich

Who is not stunned by the news, announced within the past hour, that the Nobel Committee has awarded its annual peace prize to President Barack Obama? (Obama himself must be astonished.) Digesting the story is hard. Lech Walesa, who won the prize in 1983, expressed the views of many when he asked, “Who? What? So Fast?”

Here at home, right-wingers are sure to fall to the ground in spasms of vitriolic outrage, while left-wingers will whine on talk shows that Obama has yet to make health care free or reverse global warming. Centrists (are there any left?) won’t have anything to offer other than to wonder why he isn’t more effective at pushing a recalcitrant Congress into behaving like adults instead of toddlers.

The Committee observed Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” It added that Obama has “created a new international ...

Denver-by-the-Sea, October 4

A startling discovery was announced today by the Post-Global Post-Institute of Post-Science, located on the shores of Mount Whitney. While laying the Ohio-to-Australia underwater super-conducting transit tube, excavators discovered the remains of a female of the long extinct species known as homo sapiens. Dubbing her “Laurie,” short for Lauriepithecus in vinoacademicus, scientists claim the discovery completes our knowledge of the chain of evolution of hominids right up to our present-day Humongous Cranius Enlightenmus species. Beginning with Ardi (short for Ardipithecus ramidus), evolution proceeded through Lucy (a member of the Australopithecus afarensis species), then through Laurie, and then at last culminated in Humongous Cranius Enlightenmus.

With Laurie were found several personal effects, including an artifact with the words “United Healthcare”...

 
In my previous post, I laid out the predicament facing contemporary abstract sculpture. I argued that the plethora of handsome man-made objects in the modern world made it hard for people even to notice abstract sculpture, let alone contemplate it for its aesthetic value. I offered a list of some of the most famous abstract sculptors -- artists who have made it to the top of the art-career mountain -- and pointed out that much of the time they make sculpture that is actually better described as either “installation art” or “assemblage” rather than straightforward sculptural objects.

It’s not easy to find serious, good abstract artists who make straightforward, sculptural objects. Simply put, abstract sculpture has gone out of fashion -- even more than abstract painting -- and it takes a certain dogged determination for any sculptor to keep on making single...