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Looking at art leads to thinking about life
“I don’t care for bohemian culture. Innocent people are hurt by it,” says Richard Neel, eldest son of the painter Alice Neel in Andrew Neel’s documentary film, now available on DVD from New Video. “I was hurt by it.” “You always hurt the one you love,” goes the old pop standard. In this film, Neel ...
I still remember seeing the Tribute in Light from the New Jersey side of the Hudson. From a distance, the twin beams of light standing where the World Trade Center had before the events of September 11th stood out among the sea of lights of the nighttime New York skyline. Today, that location still ...
In the midst of the circus surrounding Pastor Terry Jones’ plan to burn Qurans on the anniversary of September 11th, perhaps the most disturbing aspect is the emerging meme among conservatives that Jones’ act is somehow analogous to other religious statements in the form of art that liberals have ...
“Hey, Kiddo.” When she was a young girl, Berkeley Reinhold would pick up the phone and hear Andy Warhol greet her with those words. Although he was calling for her father, a close friend, Warhol would take the time to talk to Berkeley about what she and her friends were interested in. “She was Andy ...
When you compile a list of artists that other artists love to hate, a few names typically appear: Jeff Koons, Thomas Kinkade, and, perhaps most virulently, Damien Hirst. You can call it jealousy over their financial success, or you can call it disdain for the artwork that brings those riches home ...
When we think of Sigmund Freud, we think first of words—the “talking cure” of psychoanalysis, books such as The Interpretation of Dreams , and the infamous Freudian slip. In Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art , Mary Bergstein, Professor in the History of Art and Visual ...
“Impossible, you say?” one of the early pages asks rhetorically in Art of McSweeney’s , a study of the art of the quirky periodical McSweeney’s Quarterly . “Nothing is impossible when you work for the circus.” With David Eggers as the chief ringmaster, McSweeney’s Quarterly gathers together all ...
When Roland Penrose began buying artwork after returning to England in 1935, he focused on purchasing the works of the Parisian Surrealists—the circle of artists that had embraced him as one of their own. Old friends such as Dali, Magritte, Miro, Picasso, De Chirico, and others graced Penrose’s ...
On August 23rd, the Public Broadcasting System launched a new web portal for promoting the arts. PBS Arts spearheads an overall expansion of arts programming to take place over the next year that will include a night each week dedicated solely to the arts. What makes this development especially ...
If you think that a thumbs up in ancient Rome meant that the beaten gladiator would live and that a thumbs down meant death, you can thank Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1872 painting Pollice Verso (shown above) for that. In reality, thumbs down meant “stick your sword in the ground” and no kill. Thumbs up ...
“The main argument here is that pleasure is deep,” Paul Bloom writes early on in his new book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like . “What matters most is not the world as it appears to our senses. Rather, the enjoyment we get from something derives from what we think the ...
I always used to laugh at people who ignored the lyrics to “Every Breath You Take” by The Police and thought it was a lovely love song. If it’s about love at all, it’s about obsessive love—creepy, obsessive love that watches you through the windows late at night as you sleep. Stalking, however ...
Growing up, I always found the few Black faces in superhero comic books fascinating, like rare birds. Luke Cage, aka, Power Man, bristled with attitude like Shaft on steroids. Black Lightning bolted through the air with an electrified Afro. The Falcon soared beside Captain America as a dark ...
“Painting is a battlefield… about what is, what is not, what ought to be, what I like, what I hate, what I love,” says Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca, subject of a retrospective exhibition titled Guillermo Kuitca: Everything—Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980-2008 at the Walker Art Center. One ...
There’s a telling moment early on in Alison Chernick’s 2004 film The Jeff Koons Show , now available on DVD from Microcinema. Jeff Koons muses on his idyllic childhood and how he sold candy and gift wrap door to door as a very young boy. Whenever someone opened their door to the ever-smiling, ever ...