Inauguration Day
The Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine (detail) Jacques-Louis David 1805-7.
The Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine (detail) Jacques-Louis David 1805-7.
On July 26, 2023, Randy Meisner, a founding member of the American soft rock band the Eagles, succumbed to COPD, otherwise known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He died at the age of 77. Gone to join the great majority after leaving his mark on contemporary music, he will be missed. This will not be a conventual obituary, because frankly…
In January of 2002, then Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, censored a pair of classic Art Deco statues located in the Great Hall of the Justice Department. I wrote about this ridiculous act of Taliban-like extremism at the time it happened. Ashcroft, a Christian fundamentalist, was made terribly uncomfortable by the statues. In order to protect western…
In the late 1700s the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) created a series of eighty etchings he titled Los Caprichos (The Caprices). An irrational thought or action can be a “caprice,” and Spanish society at the time provided Goya with myriad examples of ferocious caprices. For instance, Goya created paintings and prints that wryly scrutinized the Spanish…
I am one of those artists sounding warnings about the negative impact Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having on the arts, from painting and drawing to photography, literature, musical composition and performance, as well as the cinematic arts. I was writing a critique of AI when I got word of Google’s latest AI application. My treatise is temporarily delayed, but consider…
Some people have no business being artists… and others have no business holding public office. Put the two together and you get, well, the following story. Actress Jane Seymour fancies herself a painter. As with the artworks of most pop celebrities who turn to the “hobby” of painting after a dazzling and money-spinning career, it’s not quality or profundity that…
Los Caprichos, the world-renown etchings by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), are being displayed at the Cal State Fullerton Art Gallery in Fullerton, California, from November 1, 2008 through December 12, 2008. The exhibit is actually the tenth stop in a traveling national museum tour that began in 2005 and is slated to continue until 2010. [ El…