CREON, founded in 2009 by Norm Hinsey, presents a diverse and serendipitous mix of events in a Gramercy/Flat Iron hideaway location.

 

“A warmness of anomie filled me at CREON.” -  Charlie Finch, Artnet

“. . . like in old times, clever, fresh and to the point.” -  Lucio Pozzi

"CREON is special, encounters happen, dreams happen, feelings resurface, actions come alive." -  Monica Espinel

 

not quite 25 things about CREON 

1.       Creon, ruler of Thebes, figures prominently in the plays Oedipus the King and Antigone written by Sophocles.  As Oedipus’ uncle (and then brother-in-law), Creon is one of the more tragic characters of Greek plays.

2.       All art is experience, yet all experience is not art.

3.       How are you supposed to separate a line on a painting from a rod on the wall?  Well, of course, you do it on a scale of values.  And what we are talking about in pictorial art is a scale of values.  In other words, the line in the center has some kind of compound meaning that gives it the emphasis to be focused on.  Whereas the rod on the wall, of course, is very meaningless.  So therefore you can, in a sense, just not see it; in other words, you can just dilate it right out of your visual range.  So what we are really talking about in this whole process is not anything to do with the painting itself, but rather something to do with this thing of value, that which makes an object exist in the world with the ability to isolate itself.

4.      Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!

5.      Bad art is “Wow! Huh?”  And good art is “Huh? Wow!”

6.      The search for who we are does not lead to complacency or arrogance.  It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.

7.      Ephemeralization - the ever-more efficient use of resources.

8.      Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial, the space is devoted to the technology of aesthetics. Works of art are mounted, hung, scattered for study. Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes. Art exists in a kind of eternity of display, and there is no time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbo-like status; one has to have died already to be there.  Indeed the presence of that odd piece of furniture, your own body, seems superfluous, an intrusion.

9.      In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.  Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.

10.   All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

11.   My role in society, or any artist or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

12.   It doesn't matter what you wear as long as you are there.

13.   Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly.  Everything that can be said can be said clearly.  . . .  Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

14.   So little of what could happen, does happen.

15.   ANDRE: . . . and now, technically, of course, technically, the situation was a very interesting one, because if you find yourself in a forest with a group of forty people who don't speak your language, then all your moorings are gone.

WALLY: Right.

ANDRE: To do scenes, or improvisations, or exercises in this kind of forest is ridiculous. And then, the question is, if you're not a tourist, if you can't be there as a tourist, if you can't be there in a certain sense as a maker of art or creator of art, what to do.

WALLY: Uh-huh.

ANDRE: What do you do?  What do you do that has any kind of meaning or importance?

16.   The more people are free to rise on their own merits, the more they will race on the treadmill for status.  The pursuit of happiness collides with the frustrations inherent in the zero-sum competition for power, prestige and the attention of the sexiest person in the room.

17.   Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

18.   I have discovered that all of our unhappiness comes from one thing: that we cannot bear to sit in our room, alone and silent.

19.  There are no passengers on spaceship earth.  We are all crew.

 

many thanks to Robert Irwin, Stanley Kubrick, Carl Sagan, Brian O’Doherty, Ed Rusha, James Turrell, R. Buckminster Fuller, Elwood P. Dowd, John Lennon, Oscar Wilde, Martha & the Vandellas, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Salvadore Dali, Wallace Shawn & Andre Gregory, David Bell, Roger Bacon, Pascal, Marshall McLuhan