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Looking at art leads to thinking about life
Prison does things to a man, even if he gets to go home at the end of a long day of guarding the inmates. Scotland’s HM Prison Barlinnie features the same overcrowded conditions and gallows past of American prisons, but it also lays claim to one famous, rather than infamous, alumnus—photographer ...
One of the must-see destinations for any traveler to New York City is The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Skirting the eastern edge of Central Park, the Met epitomizes the encyclopedic museum bringing millennia of art from every corner of the globe under one roof. A class action lawsuit coming before a ...
The appeal of the British drama/high-class soap opera Downton Abbey for American audiences has long been a subject of great speculation. Simon Schama called the show “cultural necrophilia” for bringing to life a time he saw as long dead and rightfully so for all its elitism and iron-clad class ...
On the morning of March 18, 1990, two thieves dressed as Boston police walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and 81 minutes later walked out with an estimated $500 million USD worth of fine art, including Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and Vermeer’s The Concert (shown above ...
Artist Charles Krafft’s enjoyed a dark, edgy, “don’t you see the irony” reputation for more than 20 years now. Krafft’s Nazi-inspired ceramics (such as his portrait bust of Adolf Hitler’s head turned into a teapot titled Hitler Idaho; shown above) appear in exhibitions and museums across America ...
As the eyes of the Catholic world (and beyond) remain glued to the chimney of the Sistine Chapel (shown above) for the white smoke indicating the election of a new pontiff, there’s a different picture that the Papal Conclave of Cardinals should be taking note of in the Eternal City. Antonio Garullo ...
“I’m a storyteller at heart,” Star Wars mastermind George Lucas says at the beginning of his proposal for a new museum to be built on the grounds of San Francisco’s Presidio, “and I understand the power of a visual image to tell a story.” The Lucas Cultural Arts Museum, the proposed name for the ...
This week’s unveiling of Leo Villareal’s The Bay Lights (shown above), the world’s largest LED sculpture running along 1.8 miles of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, shone a light on more than just the waters between San Fran and Oakland. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal profiled several ...
“The latest fashion... is absolutely necessary for a painting,” artist Édouard Manet announced in 1881. “It’s what matters most.” When most people think of Impressionism, they may think of flowers, haystacks, water lilies, dancers, and even nude bathers, but rarely of haute couture caught on canvas ...
A little over a year ago, I wrote about The Herb Block Foundation’s gloom and doom report titled The Golden Age for Editorial Cartoonists at the Nation’s Newspapers is Over . Founded by legendary editorial cartoonist, Herbert Block, aka, Herblock, The Herb Block Foundation strives mightily to keep ...
When the College of Cardinals convenes next month in the Sistine Chapel to elect the successor to Pope Benedict XVI, Michelangelo’s majestic ceiling will hang over them while his Last Judgment passes silent judgment over their deliberations. But a different set of frescoes by a different ...
Nothing hurts like a blown call. Baseball’s bittersweet beauty owes much to moments such as Umpire Jim Joyce’s missing a call to rob Detroit Tigers’ pitcher Armando Galarraga of a perfect game, that rarest of baseball feats, in 2010. In baseball, calls are irreversible. In the world of art ...
Poets quite often make the best art critics. The same aesthetic antennae attuned to language and meaning come into play when diving into the meaning of visual art. So, when Irish poet Seamus Heaney, 1995 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (among a slew of other prizes), talked to More ...
“First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen": those famous accolades have followed George Washington—first U.S. President and the beardless half of today’s Presidents’ Day holiday—since the very beginning of his transformation from man to myth in the American pantheon ...
If any painting could be labeled “not safe for work,” it’s Gustave Courbet’s 1866 L'Origine du monde (in English, The Origin of the World; and, once again, NSFW). Banned even from Facebook, proving that prudery’s alive and well in the 21st century, Courbet’s graphically realistic painting of a ...