Theme: Art
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As the Seine lights swung past us, my flatmate Gin and I took little sips of brandy from her silver flask. “You do know a student ball is a costume party, don’t you?” “Why didn’t you tell me at the theater? We could have borrowed something from the dressing room.”Read more
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Paintings are the moon and stars in a dark sky for Australian Aboriginal communities. The economic success of this art holds out an almost utopic prospect of a cultural renaissance. Yet poverty, violence and third-world living standards in its remote communities remain the present reality.Read more
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Physical distance is difficult because of the helplessness it engenders. To see one’s world unraveling continents and oceans away and to feel that you can’t do anything can be terribly frustrating. But with distance, one also sees more clearly. Art, as I understand it, and this includes philosophy, is about cultivating a certain distance so that we might, in turn, lend our vision to those in the thick of historic events.Read more
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What I have been doing as of late has been live performances as Chuleta (my ghetto girl character) doing Contemporary Art Q&A’s. I have been interested in viral video as a mode of communication, web cams and low fi technology, especially since most artists are working with such modest incomes and materials, as well as using the Chuleta character as a critique on the exclusionary nature of art world, the white box and the expectation of an urban woman not knowing much about contemporary art.Read more
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By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society.Read more
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It was obvious from my very first day that Sotheby’s would be exactly as I had come to imagine it. As the elevator reached each floor, archetypes spilled forth. Read more
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A selection of photographs from the 2006, 2009 and 2011 showings of Johan's When The Kingdom Comes exhibition.Read more
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“Imagine a world without art.” This could easily have been the message greeting visitors to the Wikipedia site on January 18, 2012, when it went silent in protest against legislation proposed in Congress (Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA). Read more
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Guy Laramée's 'Biblos' project.Read more
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I first heard of Patti Smith in 1971, when I was seventeen. The occasion was an unsigned half-column item in the New York Flyer, a short-lived local supplement to Rolling Stone, marking the single performance of Cowboy Mouth, a play she cowrote and costarred in with Sam Shepard, and it was possibly her first appearance in the press.Read more
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Marshall McLuhan deserves to be re-evaluated as a rhetorician because he has described and demonstrated a perspective on rhetoric that remains significant. That perspective involves aesthetic, social, and cultural elements that gravitate around a mythos of (w)holistic understanding: an auditory experience, which is the evolutionary result of electronic media. Read more
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Facing a blank canvas or blank page is a moment of pure potential, one that can be enervating or paralyzing. It causes a pause, a hesitation, in anticipation of the moment of inception—even of one that never comes.Read more
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Ten or twelve years ago, when I was visiting Berlin, Stan Persky took me to see Cranach the Elder’s painting of the Fountain of Youth at the Gemäldegalerie. It is a medium-sized canvas that depicts, in excruciating detail, a rectangular swimming pool seen in perspective full of happily cavorting men and women. Read more
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At a Pittsburgh gallery in 2006, artist Keny Marshall exhibited 3D Pipes, an elaborate, freestanding installation of aged metal plumbing. “Everybody’s got 3D Pipes on their computer,” said Marshall in an interview.Read more
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During the decades (more than three) that I've been studying the Renaissance, it has changed considerably. I can remember the flood in Florence in 1966, and the general horror and will to help that followed. One hundred people died, a humanitarian disaster of a lesser scale than the 230,000 tsunami victims of 2004, yet consternation at the cultural impact was certainly high.Read more
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Marat Gelman is a well-known Moscow cultural figure. In 2008 he went to curate the Museum of Contemporary Art in provincial Perm, where his ideas for a cultural revolution have encountered considerable local opposition. Arguments about art soon developed into a fully-fledged political battle. Read more
