Summer Thoughts: Letter From the Editor - August 2022

 Summer at the beach. Photographer and date unknown.
 

By NOAH BECKER August, 2022

First of all, happy summer to all the international readers and fans of this magazine. Hope you are all camping, hiking and barbecuing...

As most people know, I’m a painter and musician who started Whitehot Magazine in 2005. Many know that Whitehot Magazine revolutionized how art is written about and talked about online and beyond. We have the best writers creating texts for us internationally...

But why is this magazine an important experiment? Why have I been building with all these thinkers and creative people for 16 or more years? What is it about my history and personality that makes me want to spearhead such a large project central to the Art World and its thoughts about contemporary art? 

It's difficult to summarize in one article, it's more of a book or manifesto but here are some insights for you:

I’ve spent a lot of time writing poetry with smoke – that is my past. My youth was a series of sand castles meant to stand the test of time. The Internet is also a puff of smoke, daily thoughts tossed into the swirling void of dead knowledge. We overrate ourselves on what the New York Times called the “success theatre” of social media. We think pop culture exists online in 2022 but as Rapper Vanilla Ice said in a recent interview, "The 1990s was the last generation before the internet ruined pop culture."

What I also discovered on my physical journeys through the Art World is that what happens in real-life is also important. Life must happen away from the madness of the smart phone or computer screen. So then social media is there to make an imprint on the physical world, as opposed to an imprint within itself. I'm avoiding the Metaverse for now...

So we leave an imprint on the world, hopefully more than a carbon footprint before we disappear. In this sense, The New York art scene or international art scene is there to catch our ghost but only if it’s a worthy ghost. We are vessels - our bodies make what we make but we are the materials used by the divine - not the embodiment of the divine.

I don’t exist, but if I’m there at all it’s as a lightening rod, to catch and throw lightening...

Artist and Whitehot publisher Noah Becker in an undated photobooth image.

In addition to publishing Whitehot, and showing my paintings, I’m a recognized member of the New York jazz community, or an “it cat” as musicians call me from the 1990s New York scene. I've played the saxophone over the years in places like the Village Vanguard and Smalls Jazz Club.

Some of the most interesting artists I know have children and mortgages or 9-5 jobs. I’m a very basic person with none of those things to complicate my life. I’m always amazed at how people with kids and wives and somewhat regular lives can be more productive than I am. But I eventually get things done...

I’m here working every day doing my best for the invisible mysterious audience behind the mirror. It’s an unforgiving audience that allows one to enter their private world with the hope of enlightenment on both sides of the glass.

Thank you for joining us here at Whitehot Magazine...WM