Calvin Tomkins' Lives of the Artists profiles ten major contemporary artists: Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, Richard Serra, James Turrell, Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, and John Currin. (Each profile was originally published in The New Yorker during the last decade, compiled, and, if necessary, updated here.) Each of these ten has made a significant impact on the art world in the last 40 years, some not even by way of the art they've created.

Tomkins, from the preface:

[Contemporary] art, it seemed, could be whatever artists decided it was, and there were no restrictions on the new methods and materials -- from video and verbal constructs to raw nature and urban detritus -- that they could use. The limitless freedom of the modern artist has been an unending burden. If art can be anything, where do you begin?

Where to begin, indeed. This collection features many different starting points, both in the artist's place in the world and in the artwork itself. However, it's by no means a ten best or meant to be representative of art today. Tomkins doesn't imply that and neither do I. "Common denominators are notably absent," he writes.

Lives of the Artists, though, is a good intro to the lives beyond the work of some artists I didn't know much about (Turrell, Currin, Barney, Hirst) and a refresher of sorts to some I did know quite a bit about (Sherman, Schnabel, Johns, Koons). And in Cattelan's instance, it made me like him less while giving me a greater appreciation of his work. Go figure.

I visited Chad Cartwright, aka CHD:WCK!, in his studio recently to check out his work, make some photos, shoot the shit, and listen to the new Erykah Badu record.

Check out Chad's work: CHD:WCK!.

(And, by the way, the new Badu record is pretty damn good.)

Gabriel Orozco:

People forget that I want to disappoint. I use that word deliberately. I want to disappoint the expectations of the one who waits to be amazed.

I think that's the main thing that draws me into Orozco's work.

For the record, I don't like everything Orozco does. Yet with each and every piece he forces me to put aside my assumptions and expectations of what it is I'm looking at or experiencing, whether it's bicycles, cars, yogurt caps, a shoebox, a ping pong (or ping pond) table, or a photograph.

I'm moved by art that challenges me, that forces me to look deeper, longer. Orozco does it to me every time. And I, in turn, am inspired to do the same.

My photos of my kids are better than your photos of your kids.

Mother, wife, doctor, adulterer, protagonist, and human Katie Carr from Nick Hornby's novel How to Be Good:

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

You just have to love someone.

Yep, that about sums it up.

I took this collage I recently created and made two black and white copies of it. I gave a copy to each of my kids and asked them to take the images further, however they wanted. I provided colored pencils, markers, stickers, pastels, and other random tools and they went at it.

This is Sophia's (she's 4):

This is Nick's (he's 7):

I love Michael Chabon's writing. As a fan of his work -- and a husband, father, and son -- I couldn't resist picking up a copy of his collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son.

It's actually one of the most impulsive book purchases I have ever made. I saw it on the "New in Paperback" table at Barnes & Noble, read "Michael Chabon" and the title, picked it up, and went straight to the checkout line. That's some devil may care book buying.

Reading Manhood for Amateurs I felt as if I was sitting next to Chabon at a bar, each of us (well, mainly him) telling each other stories about our lives as husbands and fathers -- talking to your kids about drugs, our relationships with women, geekdom, being handy around the house, and so much more.

These lines ring especially true, for some guys more than others:

This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is yourself. To behave as if you have everything firmly under control even when you have just sailed your boat over the falls.

But what really makes Chabon's essays shine is when he hits on our human condition, not just as men, but as parents and people who care about things.

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that "our most precious resource is our children." But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared. You bring your little story to the workshop, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't; and then you're gone, and it's time for somebody else to have the floor.

That's the thing that always gets me about Chabon's work, be it in these essays or the magnificent The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: it's the experiences we share, not those we own or keep to ourselves, that make us who we are.

A collection of photographs outside the studio of a portrait photographer on calle Río Lerma in Mexico City. I wanted to walk in at some point and have him make a photo of me, but the place was always closed. This photo is my souvenir.

Ben Ratliff has a sobering review of the latest reissue of Exile on Main Street, the classic Rolling Stones album from 1972, over at The New York Times.

One of the selling points for the reissue is its 64-page booklet, which features tons of photographs by French photographer Dominique Tarlé. Tarlé had incredible access to the private world of the Stones during that very crazy, very hedonistic, very creative time in their career.

Crazy? Hedonistic? Creative?

Yep. Ratliff writes:

[Exile on Main Street] is often called one of the best rock records ever made, and framed as an after-the-fact concept album: a wise horror show, an audio diary of rock stars finally facing the rigors of marriage, children and addiction. (“‘Exile’ is about casualties, and partying in the face of them,” the critic Lester Bangs wrote in 1972. “The party is obvious. The casualties are inevitable.”)

Tarlé shows us a little of what Ratliff and Bangs write about and a whole lot more.

See more of Tarlé's photographs and go back and listen to Exile on Main Street. Neither are perfect, but they each capture a very important time in rock and roll history.

The Ask is one of the funniest and saddest books I've read in a while. Sam Lipsyte has introduced us to a bunch of people, just like each and every one of us, the main one being self-obsessed protagonist Milo Burke, who are full of delusions and anxieties on everything from parenting, marriage, and medocrity to office politics, work, and wealth.

Milo coming to a realization that will stick with him until the page turns:

But no matter my conversational machinations, I knew the truth. Nobody ever mentioned it, of course. It meant not much. Physical bravery probably held the same value in our milieu as skill at parallel parking: a useful quirk. But the box score stayed in my wallet, or the wallet of my heart, so to speak, a smeared and origamied scrap to remind me how little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves.

The Ask is a marvelous book that shows us just how funny our deepest fictions can be.

The advantages of lighting equipment, a home studio/office, and a willing subject.

Joan Didion is one of my favorite writers. Her prose is magic, regardless of the subject matter. So when I came across her non-fiction book Miami recently at a used bookstore it was a must have.

I was born and raised in Miami, the son of Cuban immigrants. I'm a first generation American and am strongly defined my the culture I grew up in, which, in turn, was still very deeply rooted in the norms of life and living in Cuba.

Didion's book attempts to capture the dichotomy of living in Miami, an American city, after Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba sent thousands of exiles, Cubans who never wanted to emigrate in the first place, there to live in the late 1950s and on. So many Cubans, in fact, that the majority of the population in Miami by the end of the 1970s was Cuban.

Didion does an amazing job capturing Miami during the Reagan years. The book was researched and written in the 1980s so much of the book revolves around the Miami characters and events of the time: Jorge Mas Canosa, Xavier Suarez, Raul Masvidal, Reagan himself, Orlando Bosch, and the list goes on.

This was my Miami. I was a teenager there in the 1980s, coming into my own ideas, not my parents' or the community's, about being Cuban American, about Castro, about la lucha, and el exilio. This book takes me back and gives plenty of new perspective and history I was too young to understand or even know about.

It's too much to go into here so I recommend reading Miami. One line from the book, among many, resonates:

The scars el exilio inflicts upon its own do not entirely heal, nor are they meant to.

The Cuban experience in Miami is a complicated one. One thing's for sure, I'm very proud of who I am: a Cuban American with an emphasis on the latter and filled with the pride of the former.

Only in Miami...

One of the reasons I love to travel is to immerse myself in the culture of the place I'm visiting. I rent an apartment, take public transportation whenever possible, and do as the locals do. It makes for a much more enlightening and worldly experience.

The problem with that is that I end up falling in love with the places I visit. Always.

With Madrid it was love at first sight and very passionate.

Atlanta is a lover I can always turn to for a quick romp, animated conversation, and sparks of creativity.

New York City is my great love. The one I'll always remember that sets the bar for all those that come after.

Currently I'm falling in love with Mexico City. It's like that lover that you're not sure of at first, but you get to know them really quickly and find yourself wanting to be with them all the time.

I always tend to see the good in the places I fall in love with. Yeah, each place has their faults and dark corners, just like we all do. Keeping it ideal, while a bit of an illusion at times, is a great way to remember these lovers in their best moments. I'll take that parting memory every time.

While working in Atlanta recently I made a point to check out some art. I hit Jackson, Sandler Hudson, Get This!, and SALTWORKS and documented it here. I also made it out to the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center after a busy day of meetings. Perfect.

I'll start by saying that visiting The Contemporary (as the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center is affectionately referred to in the ATL) was one of the most enjoyable art-going experiences I've ever had. The exhibit, Substitute Teacher, was fabulous (more on that below). The staff was friendly and informative. The resource library was chock full of art ephemera, books, and serendipitous periodicals (read: way back issues of Atlanta's Art Papers!). Even the gift shop was itself a small gallery, full of chap books and J&L tomes that themselves were works of art.

Okay, enough gushing.

The Substitute Teacher exhibit was a media-varied and well-curated collection of alternative ways of learning and experiencing our lives. From video to sculpture to textiles to audio installations and more, it was a real treat to take it all in and figure out how it all jived together.

And a couple from the bulletin board in the resources room (and 'cause I loves me some Shepard Fairey and Jules De Balincourt):

The Contemporary is now a must-visit whenever I'm in Atlanta. Can't wait to see what they do next.

[Read more about the Substitute Teacher exhibit here, in Art Forum, and from the venerable Michael David Murphy.]

I was working in Atlanta recently and made the time to check out the local art scene. Atlanta has quite the burgeoning art community and while I came away very satiated I feel like I barely scratched the surface.

Jackson Fine Art
A titan of the art community, especially when it comes to fine art photography, is Jackson Fine Art. I was impressed by the huge Andrew Moore prints on exhibit during my visit. More by the size than the subject matter, though.

More interesting to me were the Tierney Gearon, Sally Mann, Elliott Erwitt, and Harry Callahan prints just laying around in the side room.

What an archive they have at Jackson!

Sandler Hudson Gallery
I stopped into Sandler Hudson to check out the work of an artist I knew when I lived in Asheville, Kenn Kotara. (He and his wife ran a design firm that did some work for WNCW while I worked there.)

Kenn's work is somewhat decorative and I love how the lines explode into shapes, patterns, and paths throughout the canvas.

The work I love most of his are the screen sculptures. This one, while not on exhibit at Sandler Hudson, is one of my faves. Kotara is definitely pushing it with this body of work.

On the street
From the gallery to the street, these stickers were on a light post right outside of Sandler Hudson. They're the work of Dubleyoo, mixed media artist extraordinaire.

Get This! Gallery
Over at Get This! Gallery was an exhibit of drawings by Dawn Black. The super-impressive piece in this exhibit was a collection of drawings of "found" people, "culled from the Internet and various periodicals."

The drawings were all postcard size, intricately drawn, and methodically arranged.

SALTWORKS Gallery
Right next door to Get This! is SALTWORKS. On exhibit were new works on paper by Conor McGrady.

The works that made the most impact were the large drawings of what appear to be very powerful men, almost mob-like, plotting and carrying out exploits in suspect circumstances.

About McGrady's work from the SALTWORKS website:

Conor McGrady’s recent body of work continues his long-term examination of the role of authority in contemporary society. His large-scale drawings and smaller works on paper investigate how power manifests itself in symbols, iconography, architecture and the social construction of individual and collective identity.

Not only do the images themselves, tenuous with their heavy dark gouache, invoke a little fear in the viewer but the sheer size of these works -- 90" x about 160" or so -- also lends to their ominousness.

From this outsider's perspective, Atlanta has a great art community. The galleries are showing some brave contemporary work in a variety of media, as shown above. A perfect example of that variety will come in Part 2 and will feature an exhibition from the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Stay tuned.

Jack Kerouac.

It should come as no surprise when I tell you that Jack Kerouac has been a big influence on me. Yep, I'm one of those guys that read On The Road at 20 or so and in no time at all was zippin' across the country and back. Not on a freight, mind you. Instead there was a trusty Toyota, airplanes, Greyhound buses, friend's cars, and the traveling caravans known back in those days as Grateful Dead shows.

When I finally settled on a place to live -- Asheville, North Carolina, on my own, no old friends, and a whole life out there for the makin' -- I read The Dharma Bums for the first time. It was the perfect book for my next phase of my life.

Twenty odd years later The Dharma Bums still stirs me up. It's like reading an old journal. I can picture the exact place where I spent my days reading and living it out. It was the perfect book for that phase of my life.

It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.

Amen, Jack.

PHOTOGRAPHER (to subject): Bend forward, let your hair fall in front of you covering your face, kick your heels out. Now hold that. Perfect.