David Pennington

My psychological tabs are maxed out, and there’s no alert to clear storage or update my internal OS.

I can’t tell it’s happening, but it creeps in and settles into a quiet, directionless overwhelm, a kind of existential buffering I’ve started to call “multiverse fatigue”.

No tab to close. No log-out option. Too many realities to keep up with.

Q: Who are your favorite artists in any genre, classic or contemporary? Your favorite writers? Where did you get those shoes?

A: It has to be Goya ‘s Caprichios at the time of the Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic Wars. (See Milos Foreman ‘s Goya’s Ghosts which shows the awesome connections.) I love Picasso ‘s freedom. Leonardo da Vinci, of... See more

“You should never ask an artist about their art,” Maurizio Cattelan said, immediately on arrival. “The best art raises lots and lots of questions,” he added. “Not answers.”

In photography, vantage point is everything. Where the camera goes is what we see. The choices that AP photographers make in mere seconds can shape how we see our world for years.

I don’t think we’ve ever needed genuine works of art — imaginative creations that press us to see the world in larger or at least different ways than our standard everyday media-navigation categories allow — more than we do now. But our current resources are few, because of the ways the major art-related organizations have lost any discernible... See more

the belief that you can do anything, including things you are blatantly not qualified for or straight up lying about— should be pathologized. It has many names (Dunning-Krueger, illusory superiority), but I suggest we call it blowhard syndrome as a neat parallel.

“Right now, we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.”

The only antidote I've found to the madness of my own brain is to talk to other people and be around other people. Somehow, through conversation and through seeing and being seen, I feel less terrible. I wouldn't say I feel great neccessarily, I just feel less bad.