Genius & Dreamers. The Yin and the Yang. The Yes and the No. The Up and the Downs, the Roof and the Basement.
So, this very cool writer named Jonathon Carroll in one of his books titled ” Outside the Dog Museum” says This about genius:
“Geniuses are allowed to do anything. Picasso was a big prick. Beethoven never emptied his chamber pot, and Frank Lloyd Wright stole as much money from his clients as any good thief. But it was all okay because they were all “geniuses”. He goes on to say that “genius is a boat that sails itself”.
Braque said that “ones style -it is in a way ones inability to do otherwise…. Your physical constitution practically determines the shape of the brush marks.”
“Bullshit on all that artistic suffering, “agonizing” over the empty page….. Canvas”
Anyone who agonizes isn’t a genius is an idiot! Carroll goes on to say.
And there you go.
There it is.
Could that be because dreams, are the genesis of art in its multi forms? And dreams don’t involve agonizing or forcing, they just are, like the rose petals unfold, a natural process, like nature shows us, from the caterpillar evolving into the butterfly, to the bumble bee giving us honey, to the sun drenched grapes on the vine providing us with wine in the glass. They just happen. Because they are supposed to.
Geniuses always seem to just BE. Creation is easy and they just Have IT covered! Is it because the “geniuses” make their dreams reality and treat them as such, without the wake up process that most people experience? Or are certain individuals just inordinately blessed, hit the jackpot, were given that bonus coupon, the extra gift that makes them fly, surpassing the rest of us ordinary mortals?
Most of the greats the Rimbauds, the Van Goghs, Kerouac, Hemingway, Mapplethorpe, were intense dreamers, whose dream – reality state was seamless. A unit. They all knew who they were, what they wanted, and where they were going! Dreams are infinite. They are timeless, with out restrictions or human boundaries, free – fall experiences of the mind, and could it be that “geniuses” accept that idea, live it without questions asked, and thus accomplish supernatural things that mere mortals cannot comprehend?
The French writer, a genius so to speak, Cocteau, in his journals says:
” Then I realized that my dream life was as full of memories as my real life, that it WAS a real life, denser, richer in episodes and in details of all kinds, more precise in fact, and that it was difficult for meto locate my memories in one world or another , that they were superimposed, combined, and creating a double life for me, twice as huge and twice as long as my own”
That’s pretty heavy stuff. His dream life was more real than his so-called real life.
One wonders. Is this true? Who knows? I don’t. Do you?
Where does creativity come from? The dream world is certainly a prime originator of all creative genius. The “Songs of Innocence and Experience”, William Blake’s masterpiece, is essential dream material, as is most of his work, his Dragon series, his mystical dreamy, other world visions translated unto his poetry and artwork as a harmonious symmetry of passionate self expression give us his dreams coming to live on the page.
Blake’s work is the substance of genius no doubt, and breaks through that magical world, the genius spirit taps into, entertains, envelops, and encourages. “I must create my own system or be enslaved by another’s” was Blake’s fundamental goal.
Are you a dreamer? Or are you firmly rooted in the real world? You know WHO you are. But do you know WHERE you Really are?
Are you thinking of your 9-5 humdrum rat race experience, or are you mentally swimming in the ocean of the I don’t know what, but it isn’t THIS!
Patti Smith, in her epic biography, ” Just Kids “, describes her starving days, with Robert Mapplethorpe, freshly fired from their respective bookseller jobs, persevering in their creative goals, aka LIFE, freezing, broke, hungry, in their Lower East Side walk up, pushed to the max, energy pumped by dreams, youth, and that indescribable “IT” factor that makes certain stars shine brighter in the sky!
Joseph Cornell, the “Master of Dreams” was a dream maker incarnate toiling away in his mothers utopia parkway kitchen on his magnificent dream boxes , the world outside a blur, his inner world manifested within these surreal boxes germinating in his unique and fantastic MIND!
These geniuses, some born, others made, believed in their dreams! Nothing was getting in the way! The yellow caution light was blinking but dreamers don’t slow down, they just drive faster through it and beyond to the green light signaling GO GO GO!
So when I look at Blake’s engraving of “Jacob’s Ladder”, or “The Ancient of Days”, I have no doubt that he was tapped in, connected to the dream world inspiring and guiding him on his artistic path. His images came from his spiritual, other world reality far removed from the gritty ugly, Dickensonian London cityscape he was dwelling in at time, late 1700’s -1800’s. His interior world transported him out of his exterior world. Lucky!
Living in the Material World. George Harrison talks about “drowning in the material world”, that he has a lot to do to get out of this place, and he does it by dreaming himself out. Aerosmith tells us to “Dream On”, Fleetwood Mac in their “Dreams” tells us that when the rain washes it all away then we see the visions, which set us straight, and many more musicians sing the dream theme, because it’s a popular and powerful message.
Several years ago, in NYC, The New York Public Library produced a fantastic exhibit on Jack Kerouac’s writings. During my visit, I was amazed by the extensive collection of dreams and visions that Kerouac documented in his personal journals and sketchbooks, diaries, and stories. Mysticism, Buddhism, Beatism, other world experiences, and (yes he was a victim of alcoholism ), which took him to the “other side ” sooner rather than later, but his dreams pushed him into his destiny as a “Beat” Writer ,an icon , a representative of the NY literary cultural dream team along with Alan Ginsberg, Bill Burroughs, Diane DiPrima, Gregory Corsco , Hettie and LeRoi Jones! Kerouac, definitely a dream inspired man On the Road! Death could not stop him. His dream lives on!
Genius mentality can be found in any profession from the scientist to the chef, to the mechanic, to the writer, to the landscaper, it is all about taking the dreams and making them real. It’s about the ones who believe in their dreams as serious goals, life blood, veins of gold , and pursue them. The rest of the world calls them geniuses. The dream weavers incarnate. The surrealists, the Project Runway contestants, the Chopped contestants, the walking dreamers. They all move towards the endgame, the dream dust the oxygen they inhale every moment of every day.
” Dreaming is an art of pure imagination, attesting in man a creative power, which if it was available in the waking world would make every man a Shakespeare or a Dante”
Thoreau whose dream was to retreat in solitude at Walden Pond, and write about his experiences, tapped into his dream power, making his dreams reality! We can read all about it in ” Walden”, a must for every high school student for the past 60 years.
Cocteau did it all as novelist, poet, dramatist, filmmaker, said ” one of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and our friends.” Like Thoreau he identified the dream life with solitude. While a fertile ground for creative growth the genius often survives in isolation living the “dream” apart from the world around him.
Diane Arbus, Georgia O’Keefe, George Sand, Colette, Piaf, Suzanne Valladon, Sylvia Beach, Simone de Beauvoir, Freida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath, these women were proof of this identifying quality, living off the grid, pursuing their dreams, often without social encouragement or recognition. Dreaming is gender oblivious. You are or you are not. You Do or you Don’t.
There are an infinite number of examples where dreams are pivotal in the lives of geniuses and creatives throughout time. That tells me that you can’t have one without the other. It’s a tandem experience. It’s the apple pie a la mode, the wine and cheese, the Billie Holiday and gardenias, the Kerouac and Cassidy, the Frieda and Diego , the genius -dream duo is a made to order duality of creative energy and inspiration propelling certain individuals into the stratosphere where dreaming becomes reality and gives the world a special experience unique, valuable and timeless! The bicycle built for two!
Webster defines dreams as: ” a conception or image created by the imagination and having no objective reality. ”
“Dream On”. We’ve all heard that at one time or another, meant to dismiss and demean. When actually it should be used to encourage and enlighten. Dream On. Are you kidding? Dream on. I kid you not.
When Dorothy saw OZ she knew she wasn’t in Kansas anymore! She had a dream that became reality, or was her reality the dream? This is the question of the ages, the one that the dreamers accept, thriving in the OZ of their own making , that world of imagination and fantasy, spinning dreams into reality, birthing geniuses, creating art in its many dimensions and forms, inspiring, sharing, and blessing lives into infinity!
Dream On. Keep dreaming. What? You must be dreaming? YES! YES! And again YES!
And
No – Dorothy you’re NOT in Kansas anymore.
Setting my sights on a gallery day I choose the WOW show in NYC. Jeff Koons at the Whitney!
I think Koons has done a fantastic job of pulling a fast one on the public’s ( That means us) gullible minds, where fast and furious overtakes substance and quality. But , he is Soooo good at what he does. He sells his kitschy, colorful, exaggerated sculptures and paintings as “art” and the people eat it up like the sweet rich sticky monstrosities he delivers. And like any sickening sweet overdose , it’s hard to digest, and you feel like throwing up afterwards. That’s’ how I felt when I was finished with the show.
I watched the New York crowd fawn all over his work in rapture, eyes big, naively looking at , begging for their sycophantic cohorts to photograph them besides, in front of Koons various bizarre concoctions from his inflated dog to his kids beach toys , to what looked like the biggest mound of play dough you could ever NOT need to see, to his humongous Purple Heart draped in gold bows, to his exaggerated pink piece of cake. I won’t even go into his porn mixed in with the color cartoonish themes, that kinda sneaks up on you and BAM! You realize what you are staring at. EW. People at the show though, seemed more interested in posing with the Koons as their glitzy, neon background, so their gallery cohorts could photograph them, then really looking at his work. Interesting.
Conflicting egos, I would say. Koons inflated ego is so highlighted at the Whitney show, in that obnoxious way, people hate, that for us to appreciate it on any level we have to insert our own egos into the show in order to make it worthwhile. Hence photo ops are in order. Snap!
In “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol”, Warhol, discusses in a chapter entitled, Time, his “So What” theory.
So fast forward to Today Speak, we can translate Andy’s “so what?” Into “whatever”. Right? Nothing is THAT important, that serious! Isn’t it all kind of blown up from that deflated balloon reality where it all begins? Light hearted, whimsical, fun, POP! The lofty, uber pretentious days can be historically interesting but in real time also a colossal drag!!!
And his art was like that. The pop concept, everyday things become artworks. A soup can, a shoe, a dollar sign, a cereal box, Marilyn Monroe, anything really that caught his eye. And his method of reproducing his art using silkscreen, so there was no possibility of ever running out of a painting with a one time sale. He was guaranteeing the infinite, removing limits, his eternal dollar signs multiplying with every copy the silk screen spun out. His photographic technique for his portraits of the jet setters he worshipped and who followed him around like the pied piper of NYC, were all inherent components in achieving his popularity and fame. He turned the boring stuff of life into something exciting and new. But only through art, and his cutting edge, off the grid lifestyle, that attracted everyone from the down and out in Beverly Hills types to the hoity toity silver spooners of Park Avenue. They all wanted to join Andy’s fraternity of pop! Membership guaranteed your POPularity , the ticket to Oz, the trip from dullsville to Crazytown, where everyone wanted to live in the psychedelic sixties!
But only the Cool could enter. And that could be anyone from his drugged out blue blood friend Edie, to his Factory drag star UltraViolet, to his best bud Samo aka Basquiet, Ingrid Superstar, and of course his telephone mate Bridgette, his alter ego earpiece from “The Andy Warhol Diaries”, his prime requirement is that they are funny and they entertain him. “Funny people are the only people I ever get really interested in, because as soon as somebody isn’t funny, they bore me.”
And boy, his pop art certainly fulfilled that need to be entertained, in it’s color, it’s whimsy, it’s humor, it’s cultural relevance, it’s 60’s iconography, they all integrate to promote his psychology, his pov, his kooky perspective, and he didn’t give a shit whether or not you dug him or not. Actually in his “philosophy”, he makes it clear that he goes for the opposite of the current reality. On purpose. His take on money is beyond the pale because it is sooo radical, he loves money, clearly his shopping excursions on Madison Avenue attest to that, but he also dismisses it and has a voyeuristic attitude toward the rich and famous people he associates with who 
clamour around his factory parties looking for the newest kick to amp up their boringly money infested lives. He sells his art with this kind of ambiguous talking point, sealing the deal, because hey it was the sixties, and if it was hip and new , and involved drugs, sex, and rock and roll, it was a hit! Andy managed to do all of this and then some. Capote got axed when he spilled the dirt on his so called friends in that hated tell all ” Answered Prayers”, taking him into a spiral of doom, as his friends banished him from their social circles, after he betrayed their trusts, in an embarrassing expose. But Andy does it differently because he philosophized from his own point of view about the generalities of people and situations without really getting specific, but you got the message! No harm. No foul. He managed to slide by, while Capote fell off and got stepped on.
That’s art! Get the message or don’t get the message! I look at Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat”, and see stuff, that you don’t. Great! So What? Why can’t everything be like a big SO WHAT? Why are we soooo concerned by minutia, the idiotic crap that energy is expended on daily, that’s of no real importance or substance, just time filling misdemeanors?
I can read the “Philosophy of Andy Warhol”, and still get new crumbs from the golden nuggets of pop isms, after the fifth reading, because it’s just one of THOSE books, but for me it’s also a genuine artist book written by the Master of Pop Art, an art legend that the hipsters of today have only read about in art class or perhaps viewed his Gold Marilyn at the MOMA, or strolled by that funky silver statue in front of his old office building in Union Square in NYC.
It was a time, HIS time, HIS generation, and HIS mark in history, a pop culture icon, the most famous celebrity pop artist on the planet! He once said , “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”. It’s a universally known easily identifiable Warhol quote. Reality Shows of today prove his prophecy, as well as people’s personal Youtube videos, sex tapes, and the various computer resources available for publicity hounds seeking attention. Everybody seeks that fame Andy talks about , even if it’s fast and furious, the 15 minute in and out.
E.E. Cummings. Poet extraordinaire. Long inhabitant of 4 Patchin Place, a tiny enclave in Greenwich Village, where he lived most of his life, writing poetry, next door to his neighbor 
EE was just doing his thing, that is writing poems the way he wanted to. His style, his ideas, his way of taking the inner and transmitting it to the outer, with his own concocted, kooky word play and conflicting images was not only brilliant, it raised his creative power to a higher level.
What IS that? Is he playing with all of us, or is he using poetry to stimulate our minds and force us to rethink, analyze, dissect and then form our own conclusion as to what exactly did we just read? A common phrase I overhear while gallery browsing, is “Oh my 4 year old could do that, or that’s art?…. Are they crazy”? When facing 
The goal for the artist should be to keep inspiration in high gear and continue to work. EE Cummings, in his tiny studio on Patchin place morphed into one of the most well known poets of the 20th century! Jackson Pollock threw paint unto his canvases strewn on the floor of his barn and made history. Edward Hopper looked out the windows of his Washington Square North studio and documented the solitude of the city in startling realism. Night Hawks, the painting inspired from his daily walks in Greenwich Village to his favorite diner, now so intrinsic to 
AmerIcan culture that Everybody recognizes it. William de Kooning helped make that new crazy art form, named abstract expressionism , more than just a fad of the 1950’s, but a serious new chapter in art, like cubism, impressionism, surrealism, pop, and there are so many more examples, that define the creative genius spawned from that supernatural gift, that says it’s Your making and doing and so what if people don’t get it now one day they will.
Speaking of art – one doesn’t have to be under the green fairy’s spell to achieve a similar effect of drugged out stupor, when looking at certain paintings be it a Jackson Pollock, a Basquiet, a Twombly, be it the colorful swirls of a Van Gogh, also an absinthe drinker, or the street scenes of Utrillo, an absinthe devotee. The varied shades of the French impressionists, the New York Ab-Ex group, the graffiti artists of the 70’s and 80’s, the surrealists from Dali to Magritte and the pop wonders of 
It’s not easy making art and though the paint may flow easily, from your brush, the ideas may be more difficult to give birth to. Retreating to your studio- the sanctuary where the birth takes place,means leaving behind the outer world of society’s conformist rituals in order to reach deep inside and extract the magic from the soul, that gives life to ideas, transforming them unto the canvas, the page, as the painting, the poem, the novel, the song. The additional impetus of alcohol, or opiates serves to assist in this process and enlighten the sub – conscious where new and extraordinary visions reveal themselves and in the process art is formed.
So interestingly, today in our Pop culture urban life, we see absinthe bars popping up all over the Nyc metropolis. Absinthe cocktails on the bar menus of the hippest hottest restaurants in town. Absinthe had a resurrection, and became cool again, but only in the dumbed down version, the watered down let’s pretend it’real, and of course, minus the dreaded wormwood. Let’s call it a Virgin Absinthe. Yet it still holds an allure of danger, of romance, of risk, that people associate with the artists world , and if the Brooklyn hipster landing in Nyc from Cleveland, or Philly, or Seattle, can sample a small part of that taboo life, of the days of Oscar Wilde and Toulouse Lautrec in the confines of a dark, sleek bar possibly one of the new ones springing up every week in Brooklyn, in Union Square, on Pell street, in FlatIron, with the Green Fairy working her spell, stopping time, and unleashing the fantasies as you trip the light fantastique into the unknown, heading towards that mysterious place where YES!”
I have always had a passion for posters! Posters have always caught my attention with the speed of lightening — the colors, the bold lettering, the subject, the commercial effect, all of it has never ceased to catch my eye and draw me if I see a poster I like, it’s a happiness on steroids moment! And other than my own work, I love the posters of 
Who can forget the famous Monterey Pop poster with Janis Joplin front and center? Or 
Toulouse Lautrec had his famous poster of 
Posters are a glossy, bold, immodest, brazen way to 
If in doubt, head for the 
The artist who is experiencing a drought can help fill it by venturing through the doors of the Met into the overflowing oceans of art welcoming him. Whether it’s the serious 
Oh yes, just One of the perks of the Nyc experience. It’s all here for us art people. Easy to access, when we need to get out of the studio, or just relax with art that is not of our own making.
Artist, art lover, buyer, connoisseur, tourist, or skeptic, take your pick, we are here in the Artists Paradise NYC and Brooklyn is experiencing the prom queen moment, where all eyes are on her and everyone wants to be her best friend! The artists have flocked to my corner of the world and they all want IN. It’s Barclays Center, 
Artists don’t choose to be – they just ARE. The dirty dangerous 1970’s and 80’s gave the icons of that time what they needed to create and share with the world. Today, in our cleaner neater technologically wired world, art will continue to be made millennium style. What’s so great is that it lasts forever! The work of artists past, present, and future pulls us in with its power and if we are lucky we get to make our own art and thus make our lives more real through the creative process, that possesses and forces us to give birth to the work waiting within.
John Berger discusses his philosophy of seeing in his well known art theory book,” The Way of Seeing, how, what, and why we see WHAT we see. Certainly applicable to the many varied ways people look at a painting … The way we look at everything!
My favorite place for this exploration of artist bio is 
Whether it’s 
So I go to get a glimpse, distant it may be, of a world of art where the sterile gentrification the expensive and expansive environment of today, did not exist. The perfect studio Joseph Cornell created his magical boxes of wonder at his mothers kitchen table in College Point Queens, so opposite to today’s celebrity gathering at the Hottest NYC gallery in Chelsea, or is it Bushwick ,or wait maybe Williamsburg, no Harlem? SoHo is Over for art and artists that’s a given. The only thing even slightly reminiscent there is the closed down frontage of OKHarris, on West Broadway, the 1970’s Gallery that was the Kilimanjaro for any aspiring painter. But now it’s most likely scheduled for a glitzy condo building that only the 1%’can afford.
Whether it’s 
While cruising Brooklyn galleries last weekend looking for information and inspiration, I notice now that spring has sprung the Fedora fetish has come to life with a frenzy! It’s everywhere and anywhere, that little straw hat with the black band perched slightly sideways on heads roaming the streets of Nyc , and particularly dominantly Brooklyn. It’s positioned on hat heads, meaning the head that’s genetically made for a hat, and unfortunately on non hat heads as well. That’s unfortunate. But it does give the hipster look to the non hipster who craves that appeal. Easy. Just put a fedora on and boom! You are a hipster, except now it’s become tired. Used to be the artsy types sporting a fedora with the cocky self assured confidence of the innovator style setter. But that was 2 years ago and now it’s still hanging on with a vengeance but lacking the nouveau allure it had in its infancy.
Some lucky people can work the fedora with swag but the ones who fail give the fedora a bad name . So why do it? In the art Soho days of the 70’s when art was dirty and kind of the way it is supposed to be, nobody would have been caught dead wearing a fedora. Waaaay too affected pretentious and downright silly. But in the Soho of past days, guys wore a lot of hair and girls did too. Remember the Broadway show 
But today it’s all about about a Fedora! That snappy down in the front and up in the back look that defines the hat is ambiguous at first glance but historically 
Hipsters have a fashion look that’s obvious. Too obvious. Trouble is that it’s all the same. The artists are copycats, paper doll cut outs where one can be exchanged for another. Patti Smith was one of a kind as were