Hand-made

Three Quotes

“I think that painting is a permanent part of art, just like drawing is, because we have the kind of hands that we have, because we have the kind of eyes that we have. We’re always going to have drawing, and by extrapolation, painting. It’s a consequence of what we are as organisms.” – Jeff Wall1

“I’ll tell why I think people really love them [van Gogh’s paintings] is they can see how they’re done. All the brushmarks are visible. You can see how they’re painted really.” – David Hockney2

On the one hand, we have these incredibly powerful new technologies, rapidly transforming how we live, work, communicate, and on the other hand we’re in this cultural moment which is as obsessed with the handmade, with the retro, the vintage and the artisanal…I knew all these people who were working on kind of cutting edge technologies who also dressed like blacksmiths and they drank coffee in places filled with blackboards and kind of mid-century wooden furniture. It feels — it felt — it still feels like we’re running away from the complexities of the technologies we’d created by fetishizing the simplicity of earlier forms as if a kind of authenticity could only be located in the past. – James Bridle3

If you watch the video, be sure to listen to the keynote presentation by Eyal Weizman of Forensic Architecture.


1. David Shapiro, Interview with Jeff Wall, 1999

2. Van Gogh Museum, David Hockney on Vincent van Gogh, 2019

3. MOMA, In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in a Day, 2019

Drowned World The Art Critic