On Sept. 2, 2005, NBC television broadcast a special one hour telethon designed to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, but the scripted telecast went awry when rapper Kanye West condemned George W. Bush for racism. I watched A Concert for Hurricane Relief as it was broadcast for the west coast, edited and censored, which was something I…
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…
I have praised the Getty Museum as one of the greatest in America, and I’ve applauded the venerable institution for its policy of free admission to all exhibits – but no organization or individual is beyond reproach. The Getty has been wracked with controversy lately due to Barry Munitz, the power drunk gadfly president of the Getty Trust. On August…
The Tate Modern in London currently has on display an exhibit called Degenerate Art, a small showing of German Expressionist paintings that runs until October 30th, 2005. The name of the Tate show comes from the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibit mounted by the Nazis in 1937. Heralding the Nazi regime’s policy towards the arts, that exhibit was the…
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…
Thanks to the prevailing postmodern idiocy that rules the world of art, I sometimes hesitate to tell people that I’m an artist. What might they think? That I create paintings like “performance artist,” Keith Boadwee, who squats over his canvases and “paints” by emptying his bowels of egg tempura enemas? In 1995, Ace Contemporary Exhibitions of Los Angeles presented a…
Two years after the US “liberated” Iraq, artists in that beleaguered nation are barely hanging on. Having survived the long night of Saddam and the “shock and awe” blitzkrieg of the Americans, Iraqi artists today are fighting a losing battle against occupation, terrorism, and the rising threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Back in July of 2004, the artists of Iraq were…
When I was a teenager in the late 1960’s, I found an art book in my local library titled, Ecco Homo (Behold the Man). As my first real introduction to German Expressionist art, it was an encounter that profoundly altered my life as an artist. Ecco Homo was a portfolio of prints created by artist, George Grosz, in 1923. That…
