The latest edition of the Yogyakarta biennial explores ‘Titen’, a Javanese word for the art (or science?

Philip Guston, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment. Or, was the whole world and everything in it set into an us-or-them binary arrangement because of the Cold War? Dialogues were Guston’s chosen form of public speech, several of which, along with other published pieces and talks, are collected in this book, published to coincide with the opening of his rescheduled retrospective in May this year. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Usually I don’t mind reading things like this even if I’m not familiar with the artist but I genuinely felt like I was retaining zero information from this. It felt weird hearing him describe the speed he could churn them out although that’s also part of why I chose it for the project, lol.

The editorial model adopted—allow someone else to do all the work, then conveniently “forget” the fact—no doubt helps to keep overheads low, but should we really be happy that the accountants have won again? To read this book front-to-back is to witness his paintings gradually outpace Guston’s ability to describe them. Faith, Hope, and Impossibility and On Morton Feldman are two essays I think every artist should read.If you love art, or if you are an artist, if you love Guston’s work or even if you don’t like it so much, you will enjoy this book.