At sixteen I became aware of those artists who lived and worked throughout Germany’s dreadful years of war and fascism. German Expressionist artists like George Grosz, Conrad Felixmüller, Gert Wollheim, and Max Pechstein had enormous influence upon me – not so much for how they painted… but what they painted. They were unafraid to tell the truth about their society,…
In 1970 artist Sam Wiener created an artwork that addressed the slaughter then occurring in Vietnam, but his work unfortunately still has resonance in our world today. Those Who Fail to Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It was originally titled 45,391… and counting, with the title changing as the numbers of U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam kept climbing….
The 51st Venice Biennale opened on June 12th, 2005, and artists, patrons, curators, collectors and the general public will view the latest in contemporary art until the festival closes in November. It’s been said that this biennale has abandoned the display of gimmicky artworks designed to shock in favor of more subdued statements, and that this year’s festival is a…
Is Totalitarian Postmodern the latest in design trends? It may well be, since visual styles usually go hand in hand with the political realities of the day. This prime example of a totalitarian postmodernist poster was recently spotted on trains and train stations in the Washington, DC area. Reminiscent of the propaganda posters issued by the regimes of Hitler’s Germany…
Cultural democracy is part of the structure of any truly democratic society, and like political democracy, it derives its strength solely from the people. The creation, propagation, and accessibility of the arts not only helps to promote democratic values – it is vital to them. However, participatory and community based cultural democracy is never a given, it is something we…
Postmodernist artists have nothing to say, and they will find the most annoyingly bothersome ways not to say it. As a figurative painter I’ve long opposed the stranglehold of postmodernism and its attendant philosophy which asserts anything can be art. Painting we are told, is from a bygone era, out of vogue and irrelevant in today’s context, while conceptual, performance,…
The US State Department has crowned Pop art legend, Ed Ruscha, as America’s representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale, allowing me the perfect opportunity to bring attention to the reader the ways in which art and politics are bound together. My contention has long been that all art is political, since it is the result not just of imagination but…
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…
