As the world burns and international financial institutions fall like so many dominoes, impulsive oligarchs and imprudent investment bankers continue to put their money into the overheated contemporary art “market.” At a two-day Sotheby’s London auction of works by postmodernist Damien Hirst, the artist made a whopping $169 million before the auction even closed. Among the masterpieces snatched-up; The Kingdom,…
[ The Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, California. Photo by Mark Vallen. ] All three floors of the beautiful turn-of-the-century Beaux-Arts building that houses the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, California, were packed full of people during the September 4th, 2008, opening reception of the Meridian’s War & Empire exhibition. As the show runs until election night on November 4th,…
Coming this September, 2008, San Francisco’s Meridian Gallery will present War and Empire, a group exhibition that has as its theme the state of democracy in the U.S. – as well as the continuing military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. I am delighted that my own art has been included in the exhibit, since being able to show with a…
Those fortunate to see the latest exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, 1930s: The Making of “The New Man,” will not only have the opportunity to feast their eyes upon some of the greatest artworks of the 20th century – they will be given ample evidence of how artists once responded to calamity and social crisis. On view until…
Brussels is not only the capital of Belgium and the administrative center of the European Union, it is also the city where the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is based. In addition, Brussels becomes the latest stop for Fundamental, the group exhibition I’m participating in that explores today’s religious fundamentalist movements. My painting, A People Under Command: USA Today, is…
The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, is an important exhibition running in London at the Tate Britain from June 4th, 2008 through August 31st, 2008. The exhibit provides a somewhat critical look at Orientalism, the genre commonly associated with nineteenth-century Western artists who depicted the peoples and cultures of an imagined Near and Middle East. The Tate is…
There is seemingly no end to the superficiality of today’s postmodern art and the cravenness of those fame seekers who create it. In 2003 BritArt movement superstars Jake and Dinos Chapman purchased a suite of Goya’s celebrated antiwar etchings, Disasters of War, and in a gesture supposedly meant to lay bare the inadequacy of art as protest, defaced the set…
Some years ago, while visiting the German city of Cologne, I discovered the works of the Cologne Progressive Artists Group (Gruppe Progressiver Künstler Köln), a bloc of artists that represented the radical outer fringe of the Expressionist movement of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Fortunately for enthusiasts of art from the Weimar years the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, has mounted…
