This essay will broach the subject of The Last Supper, a controversial artwork by photographer Elisabeth Ohlson. Deemed blasphemous by many, it was exhibited at the European Union Parliament in Brussels, Belgium in May of 2023. I will contrast Ohlson’s irreverent photo with a brief overview of how visual artists in the West have portrayed The Last Supper—the final meal…
On Jan. 14, 2023 a golden bronze statue of a “femalefigure” was installed on the rooftop of the Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State. Created by 53-year-old Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander and titled NOW, it’s a tribute to, but not a portrait of, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her “fight for abortion rights.” It’s also…
On Oct. 14, 2021 Hunter Biden showed his stupefyingly expensive but unskilled artworks at Milk Studios in Hollywood, California. Soon after the show I wrote an unflattering review titled Hunter Biden’s very first art exhibit. Hunter’s art career has certainly garnered much attention since then, in large part due to the efforts of Georges Bergès, the Manhattan gallerist who represents…
The Embrace, a new sculpture dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King, has turned out to be contentious rather than unifying. Black conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas won the commission to create the monument now displayed in the Boston Common of Massachusetts. What Thomas came up with is a headless bronze structure—a jumble of…
This is a tale of two cities, though I imagine Charles Dickens never imagined anything like the following. The story has to do with one garden city where gentlepeople exalt art, and another cosmopolis… actually the very same burg, where those identical magnificos step over bodies to see first-class art exhibits. Wherever you are in Los Angeles, you will come…
I can’t recall such an unending fuss about a presidential portrait. The hoopla at the 2018 unveiling of the portraits of former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery was fairly understandable, but then came the media blitz. Every magazine and paper in the US celebrated the portraits. Likewise “The Obama Portraits Tour”…
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…
