Rain Taxi, Art in America, Hyperallergic, SuperRare
SuperRare: The myth, the meaning, the heirloom that is Studio 54 and 1970s New York: an extended interview with Bill Bernstein
(10/27/2021)
…John: Okay. So, what drew you to NFTs?
Bill: Willy, Willy. Honestly, NFTs are a little out of my realm. As a photographer, I started way back in the ‘70s. My theme, my personal theme, is about inclusion, freedom of expression, looking at cultures, looking at our culture, where we’re at. The whole NFT thing, honestly, is a little bit out there for me, in terms of connecting to it or accessing it, but I like the idea of using modern technology, especially for going back to earlier artwork, like ‘70s film photography.
John: What was your first experience with NFT’s?
Bill: My first experience? Let me see. I had a gallery show recently in Palm Beach. And that was kind of the first time I heard about NFTs. The gallery director said this might be a good match for your work, you know. There might be some NFT buyers out there. I’m not sure about the basic demographic of NFT buyers. Young and early adopters, probably. But many of them are particularly interested in club culture. And my work is about club culture, almost where it started—in the ‘70s in New York City, Mudd Club, Studio 54, Xenon, Paradise Garage, places like that.
John: Could you talk a bit more about Studio 54 culture and its internet mythology?
Bill: Internet mythology?
John: When I think about that culture, the way it was when I was a kid—and I loved it at the time—and I see it on the internet, in a way I prefer the vision of it now.
Bill: That’s an interesting point. When you look back in history, sometimes there’s a romantic lens.
Hyperallergic: In Conversation with Miguel Angel Hernandez
(02/07/2016)
…John Reed: There are some books that I think about in the context of “painter” books: Flaubert’s Salammbo, The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz, maybe Kathy Acker, maybe Jane Bowles. Do you think of any books that way, or as “artist” books?
Miguel Angel Hernández: When I think of those kind of “artist” books, I think of a tradition starting in Balzac and Flaubert, and extending to Michel Houellebecq or Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. Art may be background to the plot, but there are also some artistic ideas in the way an “artist” book is written. Art is fully embodied in it. I wanted my book to be part of this tradition of books not only with a subject of art but penetrated by artistic ideas — so not only about art but with art.
JR: What’s the relationship, if there is one, between art and ethics?
MAH: As an art critic I am always worried about what are the limits of art, to what extent an artist can do anything, everything, and that is what I was thinking about when I started writing that book — this problem of ethics is at the core of modern art. In fact, I suspect modern art is a reflection on ethics. From Courbet, Manet, to contemporary art and the neo-avant-garde. My work as a critic and now as a fiction writer has been to examine that problem.
JR: In general, I think of art and ethics as running parallel; they occasionally intersect but seem separate. You can have art that is unethical, but it is still art. The quality of what is ethics does not influence and is not influenced by the quality of what is art. And yet, it seems that each act of art encompasses some transgression or criminal intent, or at the very least some kind of interrupted expectation. Yesterday I was hanging out with an old family friend — she was a dancer in the ‘80s and is a highly skilled potter — and she was showing me these big pots that she made. Some of them were just terrific pots and then another group of them had a glaze which gave the appearance that it had eaten into the clay, deconstructed the clay, which seemed really quite wrong; but those pots were art and the other pots were just pots. So that’s my question, what is it about the transgressive act that makes a pot into art?
MAH: Okay, that’s a hard one. I think that, like any job, in the profession of art there are some applied ethics…
Art in America: “To the Letter,” Peter Neumeyer and Edward Gorey
(10/18/2011)
…John Reed: From 1952–1960, Gorey worked in the art department at Doubleday, and designed over one hundred books. What is your impression of the influence of the Doubleday years on Gorey’s thinking?
Peter Neumeyer: The first time Ted visited us, I hadn’t really fully appreciated his work at Doubleday, until quite suddenly I realized that a whole pile of my “Anchor” paperbacks had Gorey covers. I laid them all out on the floor, and we all just sort of took in the glory of it all—Gide, Melville, Freud, Perry Miller.
As for “the design process” in collaborations, Gorey once said that he “never had anything to do with the author of a book [he] was illustrating” before. This was a new mode of working for him. In fact, the very first letter reproduced in Floating Worlds is fairly typical of how we often worked. I had started to write a letter to our editor, Harry Stanton, and thought better of it and decided to contact Gorey directly. The topic is the illustration of the housefly at the end of Donald and the . . .—whether he should be drawn in the context of the whole room, or stand there alone, in solitary splendor.
Ted and I discussed that fly over several letters, and that conversation more or less set the tone for how we were to collaborate henceforth. Perhaps a quarter of the book is detailed discussion back and forth both about specifics of text as well as of illustration. The first book we did together was, textually, a fait accompli when we began work. Each of the later books had its own evolution, documented precisely in the letters.
Reed: Gorey wasn’t much for writing letters. His 200 pages to you are rather extraordinary, aren’t they?
Neumeyer: I agree, I think they’re extraordinary too…
Rain Taxi: “Talking Animals”
(10/11/2011)
In Adam Hines’s debut graphic novel, Duncan the Wonderdog (AdHouse Books, $24.95), the animals can talk, and their revolution is underway. Hines moves beyond superheroes and the crusty assumptions of many graphic novels to tell his story with the patience and sprawl of a grand novel, or an epic television series. Humanity, he posits, is less evolutionary miracle than environmental upstart. Gauging by the seven years he spent on the first installment, the next four planned installments of Duncan may well take Hines the remainder of his life to complete, a Gaian pace, to move mountains. …