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Looking at art leads to thinking about life
After all the votes were cast and counted and even Florida reached a conclusion, the election postmortem flew fast and furious and will continue to whirl until the 2016 presidential election begins, which should be any second now. One precinct, one voice yet to be heard from is that of that most ...
If art can help us hold onto memories, can it help us when we lose them to aging or disease? In Creative Aging , which runs through November 30, 2012 at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, health experts and museum experts join forces to help those suffering from memory impairment, especially ...
Today’s opening of the 23rdJames Bond film, Skyfall , starring Daniel Craig as 007, marks a half century of “shaken, not stirred” spying action. One of the most iconic action figures in the history of film, Bond, James Bond represents a whole universe of personal style compiled through not just ...
It all started with a review. When a reviewer of a 1957 painting exhibition by Jasper Johns compared one of his paintings to a readymade by Marcel Duchamp, Johns and friend and fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg made the pilgrimage down from New York City to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, home ...
This seemingly endless presidential campaign of 2012 will mercifully come to an end on Tuesday (we hope). People will vote depending on a wide range of economic, social, and ideological issues, but one often overlooked, but important, issue is the arts—specifically, which candidate is better for ...
In a letter responding to Anthony M. Amore’s editorial “No ‘Thomas Crown Affair’” in The New York Times about the recent robbery at the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Georgia Museum of Art guard Ed Tant acknowledged the very real threat posed by thieves, but fingered a very ...
Five hundred years ago today, Michelangelo unveiled The Sistine Chapel Ceiling to Pope Julius II. The next day, All Saints’ Day 1512, the Pope inaugurated the newly decorated chapel with grand pomp and circumstance. With half a millennium between us and that momentous debut, it’s hard to imagine ...
What’s your Halloween ideal: Alfred Hitchcock or Wes Craven? If you pick the Master of Suspense over Nightmare on Elm Street , then I have the ultimate Halloween artist for you: Odilon Redon. The late 19th century French Symbolist painter depicted some of the most disturbing images ever made. As ...
For all the ugliness of Nazism in thought and deed, it’s striking to consider just how much they contemplated the arts. From the failed painter Adolf Hitler to the failed architect Albert Speer to the failed art collector Herman Göring, the Nazis spent an inordinate amount of time focused on what ...
Once Roy Lichtenstein started painting Ben-Day dots in 1961, could he ever stop? After a tour of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, exhibition Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, you would probably answer no. The more important question is “Why?” The first major exhibition since ...
It’s not just a search engine, it’s a verb—Google! Despite some recent glitches with finances, Google remains for many the face of the Internet, the go-to site to go to anywhere else in a flash. But if Google is the face of the Internet, what is the face of Google? Sure, those Google Doodles ...
With the presidential election less than a month away, it’s hard to go to a museum or gallery in the United States right now and not see art that either directly or indirectly references the election. In his essay, “Autonomy in Conservative Times,” Bret Schneider describes how the idea of autonomy ...
As kids, my siblings and I would flip through old family albums and marvel over old pictures of family members in their youth. More than just thicker hair and thinner waistlines changed with time. You could really see an evolution of self over time—more confident, more resigned, more resilient ...
Mark Rothko only got as far as his sophomore year at Yale before fleeing that WASP nest of anti-Semitism and elitism. Forty-six years later, Yale awarded him an honorary degree in philosophy, but in the meantime the artist wielded his philosophy as much as his paintbrush in pursuit of a kind of ...
Upon hearing news of the vandalizing of Mark Rothko’s 1958 painting Black on Maroon (shown above), a part of me cried out in pain. Few artists cut to the core of what it is to be a human being as Rothko, as testified by the enduring appeal of his paintings, which remain as hypnotic and personal as ...