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Looking at art leads to thinking about life
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 ...
This has been the “Summer of the Spill.” Since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion on April 20, 2010, the epic BP oil spill has oozed into imaginations trying to grasp the ecological and economic toll on the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. Corporate engineering efforts to cap the spill often ...
Df s;dlkj;fdslk ;lkfdj;lfdsjlkfdj My wife laughs at my penchant for taking photographs of sculpture when we travel. It’s as if I’m trying to bring these huge stone and marble marvels home with me. In The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today at the MoMA through November 1, 2010 ...
In chemistry, a free radical is the name for an atom or group of atoms having at least one unpaired electron, thus making it unstable and highly reactive. From the time after his return to Paris from Morocco in 1913 to his departure to Nice in 1917, Henri Matisse lived like a human free radical ...
Experts commonly accept the Hudson River School, led by Thomas Cole, as the first true American art school and movement. They looked at the American landscape and saw something the natural settings of England and Europe did not offer. That natural newness fit in beautifully with the uniqueness of ...
One of the most overlooked aspects of the life of Frida Kahlo is that the artist who exemplified Mexican national identity had a father born in Germany. Thanks to exhibitions in Germany and Austria, Frida returns to her German roots for the first time. The catalogue for those exhibitions, Frida ...
While Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece The Gross Clinic undergoes a facelift on the east coast in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew (my review here), Eakins’ art is being seen on the left coast in a whole new light as well. Manly Pursuits: The ...
When you hear the name Edvard Munch, you almost immediately think of The Scream . It’s unavoidable. Even during his lifetime, Munch found himself linked to that image and a select few others from his Frieze of Life series that comprised almost his entire career. Although Munch painted several ...
“Chucky Fat Face,” artist Chuck Close admits to being called by fellow artist Richard Serra during their graduate school days together at Yale early on in the film Chuck Close , Marion Cajori’s lauded documentary now available on DVD for the first time from New Video. In Cajori’s film, we see Close ...
Los Angeles often feels like another planet to non-natives, from the confluence of cultures to the often unearthly architecture. In Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970, Thomas S. Hines serves as our ambassador to this brave new world on the left coast that served as the perfect ...