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…
Have you heard about Vessel? It’s a giant climbable sculpture at the center of Hudson Yards, the $25 billion real estate development that masquerades as a neighborhood in the far west-side of midtown Manhattan, New York City. The creation and demise of Vessel is a cautionary tale on the foibles of contemporary art, but it’s also a metaphor for the…
When speaking of banality in twenty-first century art, many names come to mind, but now there is a new dim star flaming out across the murky and corrupted skies of contempo art heaven. That not so bright heavenly body is named Hunter Biden. On Oct 1, 2021, 51-year-old Hunter Biden held his very first art exhibit. The show was arranged…
On Sept, 27, 2021, “the Big Guy” was speaking at the White House about his Covid-19 vaccination efforts. However, the real focus of the event was his receiving a third mRNA Covid vaccine shot live on camera. You undoubtedly saw photos of the black-masked Biden sitting in the White House with his sleeve rolled up, a nurse giving him the…
