A propósito del lápiz de carpintero

"Así es como razono a propósito del lápiz de carpintero. Los viejos maestros, ¿con qué habrían dibujado? Desde luego que no habría sido con un Faber B, BB, BBB, etc., sino con un trozo de grafito en bruto. El útil del que se han servido Miguel Ángel y Durero se parecería más probablemente a un lápiz de carpintero. Pero yo no estaba allá y no lo sé. Sé, sin embargo, que con un lápiz de carpintero se pueden obtener intensidades distintas a las de estos finos Faber, etc (...). Esto es lo que me digo, porque no quiero que la belleza sea debida a mi material, sino a mí mismo".
(Abril de 1882).
Vincent van Gogh. Cartas a Théo. Barral eds., Barcelona 1971.

Curiosa colección de lápices.
http://www.brandnamepencils.com

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"Detenido por robar una caja de lápices de Hirst"; noticia de El País

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Fragments de: "Germaine Greer Note to Robert Hughes: Bob, dear, Damien Hirst is just one of many artists you don't get."
Monday 22 September 2008

(...)

"Hirst is quite frank about what he doesn't do. He doesn't paint his triumphantly vacuous spot paintings - the best spot paintings by Damien Hirst are those painted by Rachel Howard. His undeniable genius consists in getting people to buy them. Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand on so conspicuously threadbare a rationale is hugely creative - revolutionary even. The whole stupendous gallimaufrey is a Vanitas, a reminder of futility and entropy. Hughes still believes that great art can be guaranteed to survive the ravages of time, because of its intrinsic merit. Hirst knows better. The prices his work fetches are verifications of his main point; they are not the point. No one knows better than Hirst that consumers of his work are incapable of getting that point. His dead cow is a lineal descendant of the Golden Calf. Hughes is sensitive enough to pick up the resonance. "One might as well be in Forest Lawn [the famous LA cemetery] contemplating a loved one," he shouts at Hirst's calf with the golden hooves - auctioned for £9.2m - but does not realise it is Hirst who has put that idea into his head. Instead he asserts that there is no resonance in Hirst's work. Bob dear, the Sotheby's auction was the work.
I have known Hughes and liked him all my adult life, but I have also disapproved of him pretty consistently. I was present when he was the after-dinner speaker at the Royal Academy dinner four years ago, when he was so dismissive of any art that was not drawing, painting or carving, that I suspected him of tailoring his speech to fit what he took to be the conservatism of the academicians. I could hardly imagine that he had turned his back on all the most important movements in 20th-century art or that he was still in love with the figure of the great master whose sensibility is finer, sentiment more noble, hand more divinely driven than those of the rest of us lesser mortals. No wonder Jake and Dinos Chapman put so much energy into defacing Goya, I thought, and stumped off home."

Germaine Greer, The Guardian.
Tot l'article aquí:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/22/1

La utilidad variable de las obras del pasado, Paul Valéry

“La duración de las obras depende de su utilidad. Por eso es discontinua. Hay siglos durante los cuales Virgilio no sirve para nada. Pero todo aquello que fue y que no ha muerto tiene posibilidades de revivir. Nos hace falta un pretexto. Y hete aquí que algún libro muerto se agita y vuelve a hablar.”

“La durée des oeuvres est celle de leur utilité. C’est pourquoi elle est discontinue. Il y a des siècles pendant lesquels Virgile ne sert à rien. Mais tout ce qui fut, et qui n’a pas peri, a ses chances de revivre. On a besoin d’un prétexte. Et volià quelque livre mort qui s’agite et reparle.” (Paul Valéry, Tel quel).