A FINE DISREGARD

Happy Thanksgiving. I think is important to create space and place for self-reflection, where we can bring the diverse pieces of ourselves together into meaningful wholes. I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge one thing I am very grateful for.

I discovered the art historian Kirk Varnedoe while I lived in Princeton and he taught the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

He is a thinker of big ideas, sometimes at the expense of more refined and subtle scholarship, but he left a lasting impact on me.

One of his ideas that he passed down to Robert Storr (his predecessor at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) the experience of art comes before the ideas in art. First the senses than all the thinking.


He was apposed to "isms" and refused strict interpretations, he thought art was open ended and I agree.

After a long battle with cancer he passed away in 2003.

"Given one minute more to either parse critical theory or stammer
toward the qualities of the individual work of art, I will use the
time for the latter."

-J. Kirk T. Varnedoe (1946–2003)