Better Read

I looked at the episode numbers and thought it must be a mistake, but no, there hasn’t been a Better Read since 2021. But I’ve used a Sturtevant text before, in a way; in 2016 , I had a computer read several pages of Spinoza’s Ethica , a text Sturtevant included in Vertical Nomad , which she showed at Anthony Reynolds Gallery in 2008. This is closer to Sturtevant’s Ethica ....

A screenshot of the artwork to which ten McRib NFTs point, and to which no owner of the NFTs have any right, claim, or permission to engage with in any way. image via rarible.com Eight years ago, I was inspired by Ian Bogost’s article on the McRib to create a video work, untitled (where we all go) , about art, love, and the inevitability of death. Bogost’s theory that the rare, seasona...

detail, Robert Rauschenberg, Autobiography, 1968, 5×4′, offset lithographic print, ed. 2000 The middle of three 5 x 4-ft offset lithograph panels in Robert Rauschenberg’s Autobiography contains a dizzying spiral of text featuring key moments of the artist’s life, as well as an extensive list of artworks. Robert Rauschenberg, Autobiography, 1968, 5 x 12 ft overall, ed. 2000 W...

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled”, 1989, Installation view, 2019, by and via Public Art Fund For the 30th anniversary of its original installation and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, Public Art Fund reinstalled Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ first billboard work, “Untitled” (1989) at its original site facing Sheridan Square in the West Village. Until today, t...

Jenny Holzer projection for the Biennale di Firenze, 1996, photo: Attilio Maranzano via jennyholzer.com Jenny Holzer made her first xenon projection in 1996 as part of a collaboration with Helmut Lang for the Biennale di Firenze. As Lang would describe it, the text, Arno , was projected from a canoe club across the river onto the facade of a brothel. [The 19th/20th c. Palazzo Bargagli held the off...

Applied Ballardianism, by Simon Sellars, published June 2018 by Urbanomic This, the 23rd installment of Better Read, texts that are better read aloud by a computer, was inspired by a @ballardian tweet . It is the table of contents of Simon Sellars’ new sort-of-a-novel-sort-of-a-memoir, Applied Ballardianism , which is out this month from Urbanomic . As I type that out, I fear I transcribed i...

Artist Joy Thomas and the John Brysons posing with his official Commerce Secretary portrait, Sept. 2012. image: joythomasart.com As Artnet reported last week , in the wake of the unprecedented popularity of the National Portrait Gallery’s new portraits of the Obamas , Donald Trump signed a law banning the use of federal funds for painted portraits of government officials and employees. As th...

Gretchen Bender, Dumping Core, 1984, installed at Hirshhorn Museum, 2018, collection: MoMA The Hirshhorn Museum offers non-hearing or non-sighted visitors transcripts of audio or video artworks they exhibit. In some cases those transcripts come from the artist or their dealers. For the video art show in the lower level, you can read along for the entire performance of a Polish opera in Jasper &amp...

In writing yesterday’s post, I realized I’ve come back to Ellsworth Kelly’s “Notes of 1969” before . What strikes me now, besides the quote I used for yesterday’s title , was this: Everywhere I looked, everything I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom; there was no longer the need to compos...

SEW SEW SEW SEW SEW SEW This installment of Better Read is the text of the found net artwork, Embroidery Trouble Shooting Page, which was repeated as untitled (etsg) in 2015. When I first found the page, I marveled at its beautiful folly, and dreamed of printing it as a book. Then of using it as an abstract painting composition generator. Then I accepted responsibility to publish and preserve it a...

Laurie Lambrecht, Explosion, Slam , photo composition of Roy Lichtenstein’s Hand Written Word List and comic book clipping source material, made in the artist’s studio between 1990 and 1992. image via lensculture Why did Roy Lichtenstein make word lists is not really my question. How did Roy Lichtenstein’s word lists end up in the list of his artworks catalogued by the Lichtenste...

Kara Walker, Detail of U.S.A. Idioms , 2017, image via sikkema jenkins & co It feels unusual to feature a current text on Better Read, but then, these are unusual times. It strikes me that Kara Walker’s artist’s statement for her current show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. has not been considered in an expanded context. An artist’s statement, in a press release, is already figh...

Richard Hamilton invitation with 1951 Technique et Architecture illustration used for Five Tyres – abandoned (1964) and Five Tyres remoulded (1972) Sometimes I hit a wall while writing, and retyping someone else’s text helps get me going again. So here is another installment of Better Read, a series of mp3 files from greg.org in which an interesting, under-known, or hard-to-find art-re...

The Mellow Pad , 1945-51, by Stuart Davis, co-founder of the American Artists Congress in 1936, image: whitney.org This edition of Better Read features a speech delivered by Michigan Republican congressman George Donderos on the House floor on Tuesday August 16, 1949 titled, “Modern Art Shackled To Communism.” I came across quotes and excerpts from this speech while researching the Ame...

Reading a Dan Graham interview transcript about magazine articles as artworks, and contemplating the [so far] failed campaign for Giant Meteor ’16, I thought of Mel Bochner’s and Robert Smithson’s In The Domain Of The Great Bear , published in the Fall 1966 issue of Art Voices . This edition of Better Read is two excerpts from that work, which I imagined as a diptych. PDF scans o...

Forrest Bess, The Asteroids #3 , 1946, oil on canvas board, via Phillips Collection In 2014 the Phillips Collection received eight works by Forrest Bess from Miriam Shapiro Grosof, including a set of four paintings titled, The Asteroids (1946). They depict a dream Bess had, and the ceramist Arlene Shechet has put them on view for the first time as part of her museum-wide project, From Here On Now...

Has Questlove read this aloud himself? I don’t think so. I wish he would, because if I cry this much when the robot reads it… Download: Better_Read_010_Questlove_Im_Still_Human_20160920.mp3 [11:27, 16.5mb mp3 via dropbox greg.org] Read: Questlove: Trayvon Martin and I Ain’t Shit [nymag via @jamilahlemieux] Questlove discussing racial profiling and his reaction to the Trayvon Mart...

Exhibition announcement card for Richard Prince’s window installation, “Single man looking to the right”, 1979, at the original location of Three Lives & Company bookstore, New York, via the catalogue for Edward Cella’s exhibition, “Richard Prince: The Douglas Blair Turnbaugh Collection, 1977-88” This is starting to become a habit. This edition of Better Rea...

“Untitled” (Death By Gun) , 1990, endless. collection: moma.org We’ve come to reading the names of the dead, to intone them, as a form of memorial. I’ve never felt Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Death By Gun) was a memorial per se, more a statement. Remembering for different ends. But following the massacre of Latinx gay people at Orlando’s Pulse...

Sturtevant’s Vertical Monad , 2008, installed at Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London In case the last Better Read was too mainstream podcasty for you, here are the first few pages of Spinoza’s Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata , in Latin, which Sturtevant included in her 2008 installation Vertical Monad , read by a computer. Better_Read_Sturtevant_Spinoza_20160610.mp3 [ dropbox greg.or...