Imagine my shock and disappointment at not being placed on the list of artists to receive the National Medal of Arts from President Bush. I was also excluded from the list of those to receive the National Humanities Medal. I open my heart to the readership of this web log and confess that I’m crushed. Please believe me when I…
Cheim & Read Gallery is holding an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s photographs of male nudes. In part, the gallery’s press statement reads: “Warhol made bold commentary on commercialism and post-war capitalism through the manipulated representation and recurrent repetition of his subject. By exploiting the plethora of images and advertisements associated with consumer society and the media, Warhol exposed the inevitable…
In the early 1970’s I came under the influence of those artists now known as the New Realists, or Photo-Realists. At the time I was a student in art school, and there was actually very little training in the traditions of drawing, perspective, color theory and painting. My teachers were mostly in the abstract expressionist mold, and they constantly discouraged…
Jack Vettriano. You’ve seen prints of his paintings everywhere, and they outsell reproductions of artworks by Van Gogh, Monet and Picasso. I first saw reproductions of Vettriano’s paintings when I visited a popular store here in Los Angeles that sells home decor items, and my immediate response was a disapproving one. The artworks are saccharine and “romantic” renditions of handsome…
The Battle for Babylon is an article written by art critic Jerry Saltz. While his article focuses on the art scene in New York, his critique is applicable almost universally. He takes the position that “more artists, gallerists, and curators are taking matters into their own hands” in an effort to circumvent the current arrangement that “reduces art to its…
The International Center of Photography in New York is hosting an exhibition of wartime photographs titled: El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers. This important exhibit details the bloody US backed counterinsurgency war that ravaged the Central American nation, with the photos documenting the period from 1979 to 1983. Organized more than twenty years ago by photographers Susan Meiselas and Henry Mattison,…
I could write about the catastrophic loss the nation has suffered with the destruction of historic architecture in Louisiana and Mississippi, or of the damage done to museums and cultural institutions. But for me, the one story that so far sums up the appalling cultural losses suffered by the nation (and the world), comes from a cultural task force set…
Trouble is brewing in the realm of the postmodern art world, one of its stars could take a big fall, and with any luck his plummet may indicate the entire postmodernist school could soon topple. Chris Ofili, the artist famous for incorporating elephant dung into his portrait of the Virgin Mary, is at the center of the controversy, which an…
