I really want to get this going....

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Monday, October 29, 2007

DEVELOPMENT TAKES TIME

180. DEVELOPMENT TAKES TIME (nyc, 1967):

There's a word around - manque pronounced mahnn-kay - which means not exactly that you're a flop but instead maybe 'short of' or 'frustrated' in the fulfillment of your aspirations or talents - which means of course chalk one up for most of the human population and it's particularly true or self-assigned anyway among writers and 'creative people' so that let's say back in the 1950's as example writers became 'Ernest Hemingway manque' and method actors became 'Marlon Brando manque' and witty women became 'Dorothy Parker manque' - to the point where it went on for so long that the mandarins of culture began getting worried - how could the younger generation (they'd muse) be turning out such loads of crap? - until Flannery O'Connor famously responded 'so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence' and I found that premise to be operative as well in the small 'art-world' with which I'd taken company - everyone was actually pretty good and competent and possessed of themselves and painted mostly with intelligence and a talented competence and on the whole the entire atmosphere while sometimes edging on 'derivative' was so caught up in the sometimes mannered excitement of style and atmosphere and form and development that it moved forward quite well and with quality - gallery show after gallery show could attest to this and I'd see new art put up alongside old art wherein the heritage of the old was clearly comparative to the development of the new and the entire apparatus of visual determination was put over into the refinement of what had come before - so that it was nothing like the slap-dash format of 'let's-just-do-it' splash painting and the likes - which you'd sometimes see - but instead was serious and functional and useful and with value and in this monied art-world of soon-to-be-developed talents it never mattered the where and why of which new 'Giants' were soon to come up but instead merely the idea that 'they' were out there somewhere developing was accepted and awaited with a pleasant grace - it was after all only the stupefying media and the dazzle and splash of weekly newsmagazines and the fake-cultural denizens of cocktail party patter and soiree-evenings who needed things immediately and instant - they wanted new stars to dazzle with and hot personalities to enter with - so that for a while each month produced its frenzied new paramour of cheap culture and pop-movement but all of that had a way of flaming out and dying off just as quickly and anyway no one at work in serious endeavor paid any attention to any of that and again anyway that's never how things really are and all of life is a varied frieze of circumstance and growth so that any form of 'instant-gratification' of the sort these media and fluff types were seeking was at best ephemeral and stupid at the same time - DEVELOPMENT takes time and it's always a slower process than dazzle and shock so that patience and 'awaiting' held value of their own notwithstanding all the other 1960's noise and light going off around things (us included) and this enclave of the Studio School in its odd reddish building of multi-heights and interconnected hallways and stairwells went off quite well in its prodigious silence and inner workings producing artists and real art - lecture and real study - learning and real endeavor and I never for a moment lost confidence in any of what was happening here around me and always stayed glad too to be a part of that unfolding however it unfolded - it always amazed me how no one said a word about any of this - as if it all wasn't happening.

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