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Looking at art leads to thinking about life
For the third year running, here’s a very personal, very subjective, “I can’t read everything, so I probably left out something, so mention it in the comments, OK?” list of the best art books of 2012 in no particular order, along with links to my reviews: Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen ...
In 1951, musical composer and overall art theorist John Cage (shown above) stepped into an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Touted as the quietest place on Earth, the anechoic chamber offered the chance for Cage finally to experience the silence he had been pursuing in his music. But rather ...
This holiday season, perhaps more than any other recent holiday season, the greatest gift we can ask for is peace. Thanks to Yoko Ono’s IMAGINE PEACE (photo above), a synchronized video program on 15 of the largest digital screens in New York City’s Times Square running each night through the rest ...
Like most Americans, upon hearing of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, last week, my first reaction was disbelief. How could this happen? Why did this happen? How and why did this happen yet again? Like President Obama, I reacted as a parent as my thoughts raced ...
Sometime in the early 1930s, Henri Matisse hired a photographer to document his paintings at different stages of development. These photographs became signposts along the road toward what Matisse wanted to achieve in his painting and served not just as reminders, but also as alternative paths for ...
During the height of the Cultural Revolution in China, leader Mao Zedong wanted his thoughts spread to every corner of the country. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (aka, “The Little Red Book”) found its way into the pockets and consciousness of every Chinese citizen. Mao’s oppressive, all ...
Imagine walking into a 1,300-year-old Buddhist cave carved from a cliff overlooking a stretch of the ancient Silk Road in Dunhuang, China. You point your flashlight and frescoes showing musicians and bodhisattvas come alive with sound and color. The experience is life-changing. Now imagine doing ...
Since the publication in 1983 of Hayden Herrera’s groundbreaking biography of Frida Kahlo, “Fridamania” in all its forms has flowered around the world. Her art and her appearance have become so intertwined thanks to her powerfully evocative self-portraiture that separating the two seems impossible ...
If Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie reign as the premier power couple of Hollywood, then Seymour Chwast and Paula Scher deserve credit as the “Brangelina” of the world of graphic design and illustration for the last half century. In Double Portrait: Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, Graphic Designers ...
The sight of a grown man trying to stuff a bobbing plastic doll into a jar of what he claims to be his own urine is a sad thing, but when that man is right-wing commentator Glenn Beck making a strange comment about freedom of speech combined with a hateful symbolic act against the President, it’s ...
“A poem should not mean/ but be,” Archibald MacLeish declared in his poem “Ars Poetica.” We too-often look to the arts to explain life itself as if they function as primarily a meaning-making machine. Yes, art should give us meaning, but sometimes it exists simply to be. In that state of being art ...
Most short lists of greatest living artists will have names such as David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, (BigThink.com’s own) Ai Weiwei, Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst, or Jeff Koons. But who would put filmmaker George Lucas at the top of that list? Critic and cultural agent provocateur Camille Paglia does ...
In story after story after story, one powerfully persistent meme of the 2012 American presidential election was that the GOP faced a significant “demographics problem” in which the growing numbers of former minorities such as African-Americans and Latinos threatened to make the Republican Party ...
A decade ago, Chris Hedges titled his analysis of the addictive power of war War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning . If war truly is a force that gives us meaning, photography is a force that gives us a means by which to envision that meaning. In War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its ...
Upon seeing in person Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper , American novelist Henry James pithily dubbed it “the saddest work of art in the world.” War, weather, da Vinci’s own failed experimentation, and, most of all, time have taken such a collective toll on a work that Renaissance contemporaries ...