Posted in Art, Art & Money, Art Education, Culture Cues on Jun 22nd, 2011
ShareThe Art Institutes, the largest collegiate system for design education in the world, began in 1921. The Art Institute of Pittsburgh was the flagship school, a model for the complex which has grown to some 45 schools in North America. It specializes in design: graphic, industrial, game, and related applied art fields that have a [...]
Posted in Art, Art & Money, Artistic Pretension, Culture Cues on May 27th, 2011
ShareBEING AN ARTIST MEANS you never have to say, “I failed.” Think of the advantage that gives artists over the rest of the plodding classes. Artists never have to admit the lack of wit, talent, or stamina needed to conceive of work, realize it and see it through. All they have to do is rummage [...]
Posted in Art, Art History, Art and Politics, Artistic Pretension, Culture Cues, Environmental Piety on May 14th, 2011
ShareIN CASE ANY OF YOU WONDERED WHETHER SUSTAINABILITY was, at heart, an ideological love affair with subsistence living, take a gander:
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Take this as a fashion forecast of our new footgear when the sustainable crowd finally erases the Industrial Revolution and its works from the planet. The shoes on the left are a bit hard to [...]
Posted in Art, Art and Politics, Culture Cues on Apr 28th, 2011
ShareWHEN I BEGAN THIS BLOGGY THING, I never intended to drift into politics. Quite the opposite, really. My fantasy—and it was fantasy—was to transcend politics, leap over or slide under it. Good luck with that, Maureen. The art world itself is so sodden with politics that it becomes impossible to ignore the drift. Even comic [...]
Posted in Art, Culture Cues on Apr 27th, 2011
ShareARTISTS ARE PIGEONS for every fundraising scheme imaginable. Having any kind of public presence, particularly on the internet, leaves you open to all kinds of ways of getting a hand in your pocket. These things operate on the assumption that artists are all sympathetic to bien pensant causes; all are flattered to be contacted on [...]
Posted in Art, Art History, Culture Cues, Sacred Art on Apr 19th, 2011
SharePALM SUNDAY COMMEMORATES JESUS’ ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM and marks the beginning of Passion Week. It observes the triumphal prelude—so misleading—to bloody days ahead, a time of betrayal, torture, and death. While portrayals of crucifixions continued well into the 20th century, Palm Sunday has largely been ignored by all but a few contemporary artists. Jacob Lawrence [...]
Posted in Art, Art & Censorship, Art and Politics, Culture Cues on Apr 13th, 2011
ShareCONTEMPORARY CENSORSHIP IS A FUNNY THING. Art that mocks Christianity or displays hostility to Israel, is fine, thank you. But our institutions walk on eggs not to offend Islamic sensibilities. So it is cheering, to a point, to see a petition circulating on the internet to protest the dismissal of Jack Persekian, director of the [...]
Posted in Art, Art & Money, Artistic Identity, Culture Cues on Apr 4th, 2011
ShareTHERE IS MORE THAN ONE CONTENDER for the title “Full Service Artiste.” At least, H. Niyazi thinks so. Niyazi is the invaluable art history maven and pundit behind Three Pipe Problem, a lively blog aka 3Pipe.net. He nominates David Lynch, included on 3PP’s posted list of key topics—Caravaggio, Georgione, Titian, Vermeer, et alia. (Just why [...]
Posted in Art, Artistic Pretension, Culture Cues, Things to Read on Apr 1st, 2011
ShareI NEVER WATCH THE ACADEMY AWARDS, not necessarily out of scruple but because I can’t. There is no working TV in my house. (Part scruple, part laziness, on that point.) So I had no idea who James Franco was until I came across Joe Queenan’s description of him in The Weekly Standard:
For decades, Hollywood has [...]
Posted in Art, Art and Politics, Culture Cues on Mar 11th, 2011
ShareTHE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION features an article on an instructional project by a Hamilton College sophomore. She put some minimal geometry to work to create a life-sized Barbie scaled to the original. The result is a sculpted tutorial intended to let us know that female eating disorders have little to do with food. Just [...]