Jenny Holzer is an artist who works closely with words; her most well known pieces have all used words, cast in light as her medium. She is an uncommon type of artist, one who can write as well as they illustrate. She brings to mind the often-repeated piece advice from high school writing classes ("show, don't tell"), yet Holzer effectively does does both. She became famous in the 1970s, with her series "Truisms," which involved simple slogans displayed in a variety of ways, from street posts, to fliers. She later began to project the same aphorisms onto the sides of buildings. A collection of her texts from "Truisms" began its permanent display in Las Vegas in the MGM city center this month.

Before turning to electronic and verbal art, Holzer dabbled in abstract painting, but admits, "I was rotten at it. I was looking at Marth Rothko and Barnett Newman. I couldn't measure up." In the interview, Holzer recalls the first time "inspiration struck."

I moved to New York in the 1970s and started writing when I was at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. The epiphany for me was that I wasn't a writer, and I had to do something with these texts. I put them in the streets as posters. I did a lot of skulking around downtown with a bucket of wheat paste and a roll of posters late at night and would occasionally get caught.

She also explains that she no longer considers herself a writer in any way, and has begun using only other people's words in her work. She says she realized it was time to stop writing several years ago:

I stopped using my own words in my work around 2001. I'm a half-baked writer at best and find the process painful, and I wanted to be able to include a greater range of subjects and emotions and all those good things than I could muster. In short, I like the art part better.

The "art part" now involves working with declassified government documents and silk-screening them onto paintings.

Even though Holzer has given up writing, she still shows a knack for coming up with short, terse statements that are all the more interesting because of their brevity. And surprisingly, many of them are funny. She describes her fitness routine as "righting myself when I trip" and her favorite line of the moment "the future is stupid." She also weighs in on her Twitter impersonator: "There's someone pretending to be me on Twitter. At least they're using my stuff. I wouldn't tweet. I like when my work is anonymous and public." And her favorite chore: "I really like doing the laundry, because I succeed at it. But I loathe putting it away. It is already clean." Her nightly routine involves frozen pizza and Law & Order, and despite the fact that her good friend Helmut Lang comes over and gives out raincoats, she seems wonderfully normal.

The only thing stopping my girlcrush from going full-out is Holzer's rejection of the label "feminist artist." Many people want to categorize her as part of the feminist art movement - including the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art - but Holzer claims she is too reserved to be a feminist (which is odd, considering this is the woman who wrote "mothers shouldn't make too many sacrifices" and "raise boys and girls the same way"). Earlier this month she told the Australian that she is:

not apologizing about being female, even enjoying it occasionally, imagine! It's good to be able to practice, and it is still harder to be female, which is shocking to me. I had imagined when I was young that much of this would be resolved forever. I was so wrong.

Art House [New York Times]
Art House (Slide Show) [New York Times]

Although Emin does not see herself as a celebrity, she has become somewhat of a famous figure, even outside the art world. She has laid her life bare, exposed her history of abuse and depression within her art, which, coupled with her drunken appearance on live television, has made her into an attractive subject for scandalized discussion. But Emin still finds herself surprised when she is recognized on the street. She says,

"When people recognise me, they say strange things like, ‘I knew it couldn't be you'...

"But it is me. Anyway I'm not a celebrity I'm an artist. I do something. A lot of young people think fame is a shortcut to success. They forget that the footballer has been training since he was 11 or 12, and has given up so much to be in that position."

Although Emin has divulged much of her past willingly, her ex-boyfriend has decided to reveal a whole lot more, without Emin's consent. He is auctioning off some explicit letters she wrote to him as a young teen. "That's iffy, isn't it? Selling a 14-year-old girl's love letters?" she asks. "People say, 'Oh you put his name in the tent,' but it didn't say whether I'd slept with him and now that tent's burnt anyway." (The tent Emin is referring to was titled Everyone I've Ever Slept With, and embroidered with the names of everyone she had shared a bed with between 1963-1995, including her grandmother). As Emin points out, revealing the name of a 22-year-old man she slept with (in either sense of the phrase) at 14 is rather different from auctioning off the explicit thoughts of a troubled 14-year-old girl. "I was 14! What was he thinking? I was up for it but even so. Someone who is 19 got done the other day for having a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old," she added. Whether or not Emin was "up for it" at the time (or whether any 14-year-old can be "up for it"), the fact that the same man who took advantage of her at a very young age continues to exploit Emin over 30 years after the fact is disgusting. It also raises the question, once you open the door with confessional art or writing, is it possible to retain a sense of privacy?

Emin's interview touches on another issue that has been on her mind a lot lately: Children. Emin is 46, and she says she has finally come to terms with the fact that she will not have kids. "It has been really difficult," she says. "For the last few years, I've been secretly hopeful." She says part of the difficulty comes from societal pressures:

"As an older woman without children, society sees you as pretty redundant. Especially because you lose your looks.

"But you have to force yourself to think, ‘Maybe the mirror's not so important.' Rather than thinking, ‘I've got to get my breasts raised or get some Botox,' why not think, ‘I'm going to learn French'?

"I learned to drive last year. It was the best thing I've ever done in my life. And now I'm going to learn how to speak French."

To this, Mirror writer Miranda Sawyer writes, rather patronizingly, "I think Tracey needs to do less, not more." But Emin has no interest in slowing down. She has just released a new book, One Thousand Drawings, and will open a major show in New York in November, and contribute to two others in London. Whether she likes it or not, Emin is only growing more famous as her career rolls on. Hopefully no other assholes come out of the woodwork to exploit this fact.

Tracey Emin: Art's Wild Woman Opens Her Art About On Tough Life Experiences For Her Work [Mirror]

Related: Former "Enfant Terrible" Tracey Emin Opens New Show, Reveals Even More

[London, September 16. Image via Getty]

LONDON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 16: Silvia Ziranek poses for a portrait next to her work at Sothebys on September 16, 2009 in London, England. Turk is one of the artists whose work will feature in the Art for Africa Charity auction which will be held at Sotheby's London on Monday September 21, 2009. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

[Berlin, September 2. Image via Getty]

Ice sculptures by Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo melt on the steps of Berlin's Concert Hall at the Gendarmenmarkt on September 2, 2009. The event, which saw participants place some 1,000 ice sculptures, was sponsored by the WWF to attract attention to the earth's melting poles due to global warming. AFP PHOTO JOHN MACDOUGALL (Photo credit should read JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images)

Blackwell's sculptures are composed entirely from a single book — that is, she only uses the pages in the book itself to create her three-dimensional marvels. Blackwell says she searches second hand bookshops for the perfect book, and although her studio is crowded with hundreds of books, only a few will make the final cut. "The book has to resonate with me somehow, either in an illustration, or in part of the story. I need that spark of inspiration," she said in an interview with the Telegraph.

Blackwell has another requirement for her art: that the story within somehow correspond to the sculpture that springs forth. In her artist's statement, Blackwell writes:

It is the delicacy, the slight feeling of claustrophobia, as if these characters, the landscape have been trapped inside the book all this time and are now suddenly released. A number of the compositions have an urgency about them, the choices made for the cut-out people from the illustrations seem to lean towards people on their way somewhere, about to discover something, or perhaps escaping from something. And the landscapes speak of a bleak mystery, a rising, an awareness of the air.

In a sense, Blackwell's sculptures can be seen as an extension of the novel itself, an organic outpouring of the characters and scenes that have been "trapped" inside the pages. She admits to feeling slightly guilty about rendering the books unreadable, yet ultimately, the artistic gain outweighs what is lost:

"I began feeling guilty about cutting up the books but I had the integrity that I would create something magical from it. My reasoning is that half of the books have been sat on shelves for years anyway, or that they were about to be thrown away and destroyed forever."

Amazing Artworks Created From Old Books [Telegraph]
Su Blackwell [Official Site]

Even if she doesn't "do Nan Goldin," Goldin's photographs have become iconic images partially because of the raw honesty with which she approaches her subjects, including, yes, Goldin herself. One of her best known pictures is a self-portrait, taken after her then-boyfriend Brian violently abused her. The photograph of Goldin, staring directly into the camera, with both eyes blackened, has become one of her most widely reproduced images.

Goldin's work will be the subject of a show at the 40th anniversary of the Recontres d'Arles photography festival in France. The exhibit will include Goldin's most famous piece, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a slide show of images from Goldin's life taken from the 1970s to the 1990s. The Ballad documents her relationship with Brian, including the emotional and physical abuse she suffered. The series also includes pictures of her "family," as she calls her group of friends from the 1980s, many of whom are now deceased. Her 2004 video, Sisters, Saints & Sybils, which explores her reactions to her sister Barbara's suicide at the age of 18, will also be on view.

The bulk of Goldin's work focuses on her friends and family, for she finds herself unwilling to depict people she does not intimately know. In her interview with the Telegraph, she says, "I realised a long time ago that outside of commercial work I would never photograph anyone that I didn't want to live with. I didn't think anyone had the right to photograph a stranger." Instead, Goldin photographs her friends and lovers, something she has been doing since the age of 15, when she first picked up a camera to shoot her group of drag queens and "outsiders." During her long career, Goldin has become familiar with controversy—including accusations that one of her images, owned by Sir Elton John, borders on child pornography—but Goldin continues to defend the brutal honesty of her work, which is one of the things that makes it so moving and remarkable:

"I was one of the first people, at least in the Western world, to photograph my entourage and say that it was as valid as photographing any exotic tribe you don't know. We were the world to each other. We were not marginalized people as everyone writes of us: outsiders, drug addicts, prostitutes, transvestites, blah, blah. It was our world."

Nan Goldin: Unafraid Of The Dark [Telegraph]

It's long been understood that Van Gogh, proverbial tortured artist that he was, lopped off his own ear in a fit of maddened anguish, although the causes thereof have always been debated. No! Say some scholars at Hamburg University. It was Gauguin!

According to Hans Kaufmann, the ear-chopping came as a result of an argument between the two artists over whether Gauguin would join an artist's colony the hapless Vincent was trying to get off the ground. Says the scholar to Le Figaro,

To get rid of Van Gogh, who was begging him to stay, Gauguin waved his weapon in the direction of the victim while they were in front of the house of ill repute. The left ear fell. We cannot say if it was deliberate or an accident. In this situation, the protagonists vowed to keep silent. Then Gauguin disappeared, abandoning his friend. The next day, the police questioned him. That's when he made up the theory about self-mutilation.

According to Van Gogh's Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence, which Kauffman penned with Rita Wildegans, there's evidence of a cover-up. Further, they argue that although the ensuing "pact of silence" kept Gauguin from jail, the fallout between the two men also led to Van Gogh's precipitate mental decline and eventual suicide. Scholars have suggested in the past the possibility of a romantic relationship between the two men; this hypothesis is certainly based on, at the very least, a strong attachment on Van Gogh's part. While it's a compelling narrative, it's not a theory that's likely to be generally accepted by scholars, given the lack of conclusive evidence. Says one Gauguin expert (who might, one supposes, take some umbrage at the allegations) "Perhaps they're right, but all the hypotheses are valid given the lack of material." As usual, the Daily Mail has the last word on the subject, stating inarguably, "The theory undermines the popular image of the tortured genius, whose painting "Starry Night" inspired a song by Don McLean."

Van Gogh's ear was cut off by friend Gauguin with a sword [Telegraph]
Van Gogh didn't cut off his ear - it was chopped off by Gauguin in a row over a woman, academics claim [Daily Mail]

[New York, May 1. Image via Getty]

A reporter views Tamara de Lempicka's 'Portrait de Majorie Ferry' during a media preview May 1, 2009 at Sotheby's in New York. The work from the collection of Wolfgang Joop is scheduled to sell at auction May 5-6, 2009 in New York. AFP PHOTO/DON EMMERT (Photo credit should read DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images)

Cindy Sherman's made her reputation playing other people. Far from self-portraiture, the photographic series Sherman has starred in over the years, which has seen her inhabit everything from "Clowns" to her famous "Complete Untitled Film Stills" are a means of disappearing. As the artist once memorably told the New York Times, "I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear." Showing now in London is a series that sees her in the guise of six middle-aged women. As Adrian Searle, art critic for the Guardian puts it, "These new works deal with age, with women clinging on to a misguided idea of beauty and sophistication. They have chosen to spend their way out of ageing, or to stare it down and scare it away."

For a woman in her fifties, working in the art world, this is no small matter. While Sherman has resisted the label of "feminist" as assiduously as she has all others, her work has always tacitly taken on ideas of stereotype and objectification with stunning results. In these images, Sherman seems to reflect the futility of fighting the aging process, the valor of the fight, and sheer variety of people who come under the blanket heading of "middle-aged,' all without judging. What's different this time around, of course, is That Film. As everyone knows, Sherman's former partner has released a documentary, Guest of Cindy Sherman, which the artist has since disowned. For someone who's made the conscious choice to lose herself in her work, to control her image or lack thereof, what's generally regarded as a petty meditation on sour grapes can't be easy to swallow. Ironically. though, it serves only to add an interesting dimension to this latest set of portraits. Both works are, in a way, dealing with the role of women - specifically, aging women. As Sherman explores the tacit invisibility of her subject, she is the star of a film in which she still manages to play second fiddle to the man who resents her success. The documentary claims Sherman's part of a leading kabal of female artists, while the boys' club reality the movie portrays tells quite a different tale. In a sense, this provides the perfect seventh image to Sherman's series: the middle-aged woman, successful, at the top of her field, and still subject to an inevitable and unkind scrutiny.

Photographer Cindy Sherman's changing faces [Guardian]
A Portraitist's Romp Through Art History [NY Times]
Related: Breakup Film Makes Author Look Bad, Art World Look Sexist
Cindy Sherman's Un-Famous Ex-Boyfriend Finds That Being A "Wife" Is The Pits

In her discussion of the work of Annette Messanger and Gitl Braun, two contemporary female sculptors, Jackie Wullschlager returns repeatedly to this issue of "feminine" art. She begins with the words of several artists who rejected the confining shackles of "women's art":

At the 1845 Salon, Baudelaire praised Eugénie Gautier because "her painting has nothing to do with woman's painting". A century later, critics applauded Georgia O'Keeffe because "she paints like a man". Then came the feminist revolution. Annette Messager, born in 1943, came of age in the 1970s in France when "it was so difficult for a woman to be an artist. I wanted to say all the time, ‘I am an artist and I am a woman. I will not do male work.'"

Messanger responded to the masculine-dominated and testosterone-infused art world by creating art that self consciously draws attention to its "feminine" nature. Frustrated with compliments that her early art "looked like a man did it," Messanger decided to play the role of the hyper-feminine artist and work with typically gendered mediums and forms. She parodies the roles created for women in her sculpture, using "domestic materials" like textiles and girl's toys to, as Wullschlager puts it, "free herself from male-dominated forms and create an art of female autobiographical experience."

The debate over women's work is not limited to art, as a review of Elaine Showalter's new book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx from Sunday's New York Times shows. In this encyclopedic collection of female writers, Showalter categorizes those who resisted being labeled as women writers as "dissenters." The dissenters preferred to think of themselves as creating work that is neither feminine nor masculine, but rather coming from a more universal experience. In contrast to Messanger, who was interested in creating "female" work in order to subvert and challenge, the dissenters (a group that includes Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, and Joan Didion) did not want to be limited to "female" topics or confined in a book of women writers because, as Elizabeth Bishop once said, "art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc. into two sexes is to emphasize values that are not art." This is clearly a fraught debate, but what say you: what makes art "women's art" and does classifying it as such somehow diminish it?

Women Artists Evolve Unique Visual Language [Financial Times]
Writing Women [New York Times]

Speaking at the 2009 Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference, Gilbert said we put too much pressure on artists and other creative people by holding them responsible for their own inspiration:

Allowing somebody ... to believe that he or she is ... the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, internal mystery is just like a smidge of too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche [...] It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all of these unnatural expectations about performance. I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.

Instead, she advocates a return to a pre-Renaissance attitude in which creativity was believed to come from the outside, from "a magical divine entity" or "mystical fairy juice." Artists would feel better, she says, if they accepted that their creative impulses didn't come from them, but were instead "on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life, which you pass along when you're finished to somebody else."

Focusing too much on one's own greatness or lack thereof can drive anybody off their rocker, but this "mythical fairy juice" smacks of New Age faux-religiosity to us. If you believe in God, then divine inspiration makes sense — but if all you've got is "some unimaginable source," is this vague spirituality really all that helpful? Leaving the spiritual question aside, the biggest problem for most artists/writers/creative people in general isn't crushing societal expectations — it's money. Give me reliable health insurance and I'll believe in whatever fairy juice you want.

TED: Eat, Pray, Love Author on How We Kill Geniuses [Wired]

The hijab is a highly charged topic in France, where it's been the subject of debates about the role of religion and secularism in French society. In the artist's own words, "I’m an advertising hijabist. In other words, I cover all advertising with a black veil, which is a dark symbol, a reference on pop culture, and a way to hide elegantly advertising. It is also a study on territories and identities." While little is known about the artist - including her sex or religious affiliation — like the anonymous British street artist Banksy, Princess Hijab has been embraced by the art world, and her work will be displayed in a number of upcoming exhibitions. [Muslimah Media Watch]