Some passages from Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Some passages from Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore:


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And how this happened for me too – twenty years ago, when my chronic pain first became debilitating and I couldn’t write like I used to, in frantic bursts trying to get everything out. So I decided to write a few sentences a day, with no intention of plot or structure, and after a few years I was shocked to find I had over four hundred pages. And that text became my second novel.


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How music always carries the memory of when you first heard this music. How this can be a burden. How this can be glorious. How this can be suffocating. How this can make you shake. How this can make you sing. How this can make you dance. And this can be true of visual art too.

Sometimes, when the CD skips, I think maybe I should stop listening to CDs. And sometimes, when the CD skips, I think this is what it feels like to really love something.


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Gladys saw herself as a contemporary artist, so she didn’t want to be defined by the past. She wanted her art to be considered on its own. But then Bobby wrote the catalog copy, and she rejected it. So someone else was hired to write it.

Bobby says Gladys was not a risk-taker, she was fiercely competitive with herself and how she saw herself among Baltimore artists, but she turned her back on the professional art establishment, and after that she didn’t pursue a professional career, and you can’t expect the world to come to you. She enjoyed the process of painting, and put that above anything else.

Like many artists of her generation, Bobby says, Gladys made the mistake of thinking that genius will be discovered.


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When someone asks what is your writing process, I think it must be to try and try and then finally, in the gap between the limits of my body and the possibility of pulling something through, somewhere in that gap—


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Maybe a different way to say history repeats itself would be to say history never resolves itself. History is a lesson, this may be true, but, as with any other lesson, the people who need it the most rarely listen.


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truly amazing!

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Really nice to see this very concise Goodreads review for my book Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART.

a demand

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"Without a demand - power concedes nothing."

[This statement was projected behind Gang of Four when I saw them perform the other night. I have since learned that it is a quote from Frederick Douglass.]


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in the gears

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If you are pushing a theory that puts oil in the gears of the status quo, it is different than if you’re pushing a theory that puts sand in the gears. The gears will still turn, but nonetheless it is different.


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trying to convince myself

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I’m not trying to convince you. I’m trying to convince myself. That there is art worth fighting for. And art worth fighting against.


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Nick Romeo on José María Arizmendiarrieta

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In his collected writings, José María Arizmendiarrieta championed a revolutionary pragmatism. To deserve the name, idealists must take their own goals seriously enough to try to realize them. “The ideal thing is to do the good that can be done, not the good that is dreamt of,” he wrote. The value of lofty ideals lies in their capacity to inspire action: “Great ideals do not have to be precisely attainable to be useful to us.” For those who critique current systems but create nothing better to replace them, his words still offer a pointed challenge: build institutions, develop capacities, and change legislation. “No moans but action,” he urged. The noblest ideals risk becoming empty rhetoric if not married to effective and disciplined execution. “Being badly organized should not be confused with having respect for freedom.”

Despite his eloquent insistence on pragmatic action, Arizmendiarrieta also rejected a utilitarianism that values only results. How something is achieved matters. “It is not enough for the managers and bosses to perform good deeds, it is necessary that the workers participate,” he wrote. If an enlightened executive in a traditional company chose to cap their pay at six times the salary of the lowest-paid employee, this would be good. It would also resemble the decree of an enlightened monarch. Within Mondragon, members of the cooperatives have voted democratically on the ratio between the highest and lowest compensation levels. Particular cooperatives are free to have a ratio smaller than 6:1, as many do; member-owners could also vote to expand the ratio in the future. Mondragon’s institutional design depends on democracy. It can flourish only if most individuals continue to value its traditions of equality and solidarity. Rather than assuming that markets alchemize private greed into public good, Arizmendiarrieta built the cooperatives in a way that emphasized both institutional safeguards and individual moral character: “There can never be great works without people giving generously and without them sacrificing their selfish appetites,” he wrote.

Arizmendiarrieta’s defiance of easy categorization makes him a provocative challenge to many contemporary shibboleths. He created effective institutions without ignoring the importance of individual ethics; he recognized the value of capital and profit but saw both as subordinate to broader social aims; he created a business structure that competed effectively in international markets while rejecting basic assumptions of capitalist firms. Perhaps most astonishing of all, his insights were not merely theoretical achievements; they were realized in a dense web of structures that have become the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world.

– Nick Romeo, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy



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One Yes & Many Know

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I’m always trying out different titles for books I’m working on. Currently I’m trying out: One Yes & Many Know.


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Two short quotes from Rich and Poor

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“I start to think fear is the most furious part of courage. Knowing how full and real and justified your fears are but still not letting them stop you.”
- Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor (p. 144)


“I must experience everything that is about to happen to me as fully as possible, I must experience it as some kind of joy. I can’t just let it all speed by without living it fully. I can’t let this life or this struggle happen without me.”
- Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor (p. 176)


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[Someone posted these two quotes on Goodreads and, even though I don't remember writing either of them, they struck me as things I was rather happy to have written.]

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Also, I suppose thanks to Luigi Mangione, more people seem to be reading my 2016 novel Rich and Poor. (It’s about a man who washes dishes for a living who decides to kill a billionaire as a political act.)



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Ambition...

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I try to differentiate between artistic ambition and career ambition. And I try to see artistic ambition as the ambition to make something I find meaningful and career ambition as the ambition to make something other people will like. Since I don't really know what other people like I try to lean away from that impulse, and instead tell myself that if I make something I really like, some other people will like it as well.

Somehow related to: Six sentences concerning art and jealousy


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