Stuart Jeffries writing for the UK Guardian, conducted a fawning interview with Jeremy Deller, winner of the esteemed Turner Prize. When the reporter asked, “You can’t draw, you can’t paint – how do you get the nerve to call yourself an artist?”, Deller replied, “The thing is – the world has moved on. You’re not writing with quills on parchment….
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…
Jack Vettriano. You’ve seen prints of his paintings everywhere, and they outsell reproductions of artworks by Van Gogh, Monet and Picasso. I first saw reproductions of Vettriano’s paintings when I visited a popular store here in Los Angeles that sells home decor items, and my immediate response was a disapproving one. The artworks are saccharine and “romantic” renditions of handsome…
On January 29, 2005, I wrote an article titled Body Worlds: The Art of Plastic Corpses?, in which I criticized the popular traveling exhibitions of plasticized human bodies that have garnered so much national attention in the United States. On March 4, 2005, I wrote a follow-up article, Body Worlds Corpse Factory, which took a closer look at Gunther von…
This essay will focus on a current poster design for a July 4, 2022 event. But first, a few words about America’s Independence Day. American revolutionaries announced the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain when a resolution of independence was approved by the Second Continental Congress on July 2, 1776. John Adams, Founding Father and the second president…
African American artist, Cliff Joseph, was the co-founder of the 1960’s Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in New York, an artist’s group involved in creating socially conscious artworks. Joseph’s oil on canvas painting, titled My Country Right or Wrong was created in 1968 at the height of America’s war on Vietnam. The artwork derided the blind patriotism that made the war…
