The “pioneering conceptual artist” Chris Burden has built a prosperous career for himself based on controversy and the limitless gullibility of the official art world. In 1971 Burden arranged a stunt at the F Space Gallery in Santa Ana, California, and called it art. His exploit, titled Shoot, consisted of being shot in the right arm at close range by an…
The Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine (detail) Jacques-Louis David 1805-7.
One of the books I’m currently reading is artist Jean Charlot’s, The Mexican Mural Renaissance. Written in 1963, the book is a recollection of the French painter’s active participation in the Mexican Mural movement circa 1920-1925. Charlot befriended artists Siqueiros, Rivera, Orozco and others, at a time when their very first murals were being produced. Charlot himself created fresco murals…
I’ve created a brand new website that reveals the history of the Mexican Muralist Movement and one American artist’s personal connection to it. Philip Stein, also known as Estaño, worked alongside the famed Mexican Muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros from 1948 to 1958. He assisted the Mexican master in painting some of his most famous murals. I began corresponding with Estaño…
Worker’s Meeting (or “Mitin Obrero”), was a two-story mural painted by Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Created on an outside wall of the Chouinard School of Art in Los Angeles, it depicted a militant union organizer addressing a multi-ethnic crowd on a LA street corner. The mural was revolutionary in more ways than one. It was the first time anyone…
I first became aware of the works of Christo in 1972 while reading, Towards Revolutionary Art (TRA), a small left-wing arts journal from San Francisco. TRA had published a caustic attack upon Christo for his Valley Curtain project (pictured above), a huge barrier of orange nylon fabric hung in Rifle Gap, Colorado. TRA’s fierce diatribe savaged Christo for his “$700,000…
It is a sin and a shame when fellow artists and others who should know better, say that “painting is dead.” The first artistic impulse of Paleolithic humans was to paint realistic images of animals on cave walls. There are such paintings in Lascaux France believed to be over 17,000 years old, and up to the very present humans continue…
In Artnet Magazine’s year end report, The 2004 Revue, editor Walter Robinson unconsciously laid bare everything that’s wrong with the art world. The first remark he made that raised my hackles was, “we don’t have art movements any more, we have market movements.” And in what part of the 20th century have artists not been buffeted and controlled by market…
