• Enter 2012

    American columnist and author William Vaughn once wrote, “An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.” I do not count myself amongst those who always expect the worst, but this year even the Associated Press titled its New Year’s celebration coverage, “Bid Adieu to a…

  • Green Chri$tma$

    My humble holiday offering to the world… a brilliant satiric radio play from American comedian Stan Freberg. While his Green Chri$tma$ was produced in 1958, it is perhaps more pertinent today than ever before. Freberg’s scathing indictment of capitalism run amok during the Christmas season was promptly banned by commercial radio and attacked by advertisers and advertising trade magazines; an…

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    Diego Rivera: The Making of a Fresco

    December 8, 2011 marks the 125th birthday of the Mexican Muralist, Diego Rivera (Dec. 8, 1886 – Nov. 24, 1957). Few artists have had as much influence on me as Rivera, an artist I discovered as a pre-teen while thumbing through art books. Of course in the 1960s Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros (Dec. 29, 1896 – Jan. 6, 1974) and…

  • We ART the 99%

    On November 27, 2011, Bloomberg Magazine published an explosive report that revealed the U.S. Federal Reserve had secretly loaned trillions of dollars to ailing banks without informing Congress or the American people. According to the exposé the Fed “had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in…

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    Occupy the Art World

    The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement describes contemporary U.S. society as being under the domination of the “one percent”, those super-wealthy individuals and corporations that control everything from the media to the halls of Congress. While the primary focus of OWS has been aimed at the home foreclosures, unemployment, and social inequality fostered by the greed of rapacious banks and…

  • OCCUPY SOTHEBY’S

    Occupy Wall Street protesters held a boisterous demonstration in front of Sotheby’s New York headquarters on the evening of Nov. 9, 2011 as the auction house conducted its biggest sale of contemporary art in three years. More than 100 protesters chanting “Art for the masses, not the ruling classes!” and “They say cut back, we say fight back”, confronted well-to-do…