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….
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is the subject of a major retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, the last venue for a traveling exhibition that included stops at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Encompassing nearly 100 of the artist’s most notable prints and paintings, the exhibit features some of the artist’s most iconic…
This photo shows a US occupation soldier standing near a painting by an anonymous Iraqi artist. The artwork was inspired by the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, the classic book of Arab literature. First compiled in Arabic during the 9th century, the stories have inspired untold thousands of artists. It is the only Arabic work to have become…
The group show American Beauties: Different Stories, opened on April 1, 2006 to an appreciative crowd who gathered at the Space On Spurgeon gallery in Santa Ana, California, to view the art and meet the artists. In his review for the OC Weekly, No Punches Pulled: American Beauties’ is life, unedited, Justin Edward Coffey wrote: “Before the heat of the…
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…
On this day, March 30, 1890, Vincent van Gogh was born in Zundert, Netherlands. He once wrote: “What am I in the eyes of most people… a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person, somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then… even if that were absolutely…
