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Art and China’s Revolution
Art and China’s Revolution is the latest exhibition at the Asia Society Museum in New York City. Running until Jan. 11, 2009, the exhibit focuses on the propaganda art produced in China during the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution period of 1966-1976. The exhibit displays some 250 large-scale oil paintings, sculptures, woodblock prints, ink paintings, drawings, posters, and other art…
The Shabbiness of Today’s Art Criticism
As a longtime art critic, and as the Senior Curator for the Riverside Art Museum, one would assume Peter Frank would know the difference between “Social Realism” and “Socialist Realism,” they may sound alike to those unfamiliar with art history, but Frank should know better. In his June 28th LA Weekly review of an exhibit of paintings by Armenian artist,…
Street Art & The Splasher Manifesto
During the last few months in New York City, someone has taken to destroying the illicit stencil graffiti art and wheat-pasted posters of that city by splashing them with brightly colored daubs of paint. Nicknamed “the Splasher” by the media, the perpetrator has for the most part ignored the majority of street art, preferring instead to purposefully target and deface…
Frida Kahlo and The Dream
The culture vultures have descended. On Nov. 20, 2025 Sotheby’s New York auctioned a 1949 self-portrait by Frida Kahlo. It is titled El sueño (La cama) or The Dream (The bed) in English. The auction house expected a very big fish to purchase it! Sotheby’s sold the painting for $54.7 million. Sotheby’s said the artwork “offers a spectral meditation on…
The Pursuit of Happyness
Back in early September of 2005 I received an e-mail from Columbia Pictures that expressed their desire to use one of my artworks in the film, The Pursuit of Happyness. The letter politely informed me that the studio was interested in my “Free South Africa poster and using it as background set dressing in the movie.” At the time the…
Germany’s Art Controversies
In Berlin Germany, the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art opened a major exhibition on January 29th, 2005 – Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition. Through the works of some 40 contemporary artists working in various media, the exhibit focuses on Germany’s infamous terrorist organization, Red Army Faction (RAF). In the 1970’s and 80’s, the communist urban guerilla group conducted a violent…


