All Hallows’ Eve 2022
A dead-ication to all ghouls and goblins—Happy Halloween.
A dead-ication to all ghouls and goblins—Happy Halloween.
In the Vatican City State on June 23, 2023, beneath Michelangelo’s High Renaissance mural in the Sistine Chapel, Pope Francis addressed some 200 invited artists and creative types. One attendee was Andres Serrano—maker of the infamous Piss Christ photograph and other sacrilegious images. I’m not writing this essay as a practicing Catholic, but as a working artist. The Pontiff’s assembly…
Remember when Hunter Biden had his very first art exhibit? It was at the Milk Studios gallery in Hollywood, California on Oct. 1, 2021. Organized by New York gallerist Georges Bergès, there were those who said buyers would only purchase Hunter’s art to win political favors from Joe Biden. The White House, concerned that talk of cronyism would spread, crafted…
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…
For those who still regard art as being above politics consider the following. The Central Intelligence Agency financed, organized, and assured the success of the American abstract expressionist movement, using artists like Jackson Pollock, Sam Francis, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, as weapons in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Frances Stonor Saunders has presented…
On March 8, 2024, a woman from the UK group “Palestine Action” completely destroyed a painting created 110 years ago by the famed Anglo-Hungarian painter Philip Alexius de László (1869-1937). The group defines itself as a “direct action network dismantling British complicity with Israeli apartheid.” The vandal attacked László’s 1914 oil painting Arthur James Balfour, housed at the Trinity College…
It is not likely that many people personally knew, or even heard of, Michael Rossman – yet for those even remotely interested in the alternative culture and politics that thrived in Berkeley, California in the late 1960s, Michael’s spirit looms large. I consider myself fortunate to have known him – however briefly – and to be able to say that…