Regarding the ghastly assassination of Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (1954-2022). I found the illustration for this essay in a far corner of the internet. Created by New Zealand based illustrator Joseph Qiu, it’s an artwork created in the style of a traditional Japanese woodcut. The red-sun in the background alludes to Abe’s brand of Japanese nationalism, the crashing…
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…
On June 24, 2022, Green Day’s lead singer and guitarist Billy Joe Armstrong, shouted out an expletive laden proclamation to a fawning crowd at the group’s concert at London Stadium. The bombast was meant to protest the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Billy yowled and blubbered: “F*ck America. I’m f*cking renouncing my citizenship. I’m f*cking coming…
Long ago I visited the Musée du Louvre in Paris, France. I spent the day walking its many rooms, studying with my artist’s eyes its astonishing art treasures. One such gem was the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th century oil painting masterpiece. Her smile still beckons; currently some 30,000 people per day visit her Louvre exhibition room to gaze…
On May 9, 2022, Christie’s auction house in New York sold an Andy Warhol silkscreen print titled Shot Sage Blue Marilyn; it was the highest price ever paid for an American artwork at an auction. Warhol’s 1964 reproduction of actress Marilyn Monroe has as its basis a publicity photo of Monroe from the 1954 film noir thriller, Niagara; that original…
During the Feb. 4, 2022 opening of the Beijing Olympics, many people did not see footage of the Opening Ceremony. Instead they saw film of a red armband wearing communist security guard dragging away a Dutch reporter covering the event. It was the perfect glimpse of Olympic Games held by a totalitarian regime. For at least a year Chinese dissidents…
Have you heard about Vessel? It’s a giant climbable sculpture at the center of Hudson Yards, the $25 billion real estate development that masquerades as a neighborhood in the far west-side of midtown Manhattan, New York City. The creation and demise of Vessel is a cautionary tale on the foibles of contemporary art, but it’s also a metaphor for the…
On Nov. 3, 2021 the New York Times published Can We Separate the Art From the Artist?, an opinion piece by their regular columnist Jennifer Finney Boylan. It compared classic rock performers like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to the statues of Confederate generals, implying it was time to topple classic rockers for their politically incorrect behavior. Boylan put…
