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Selling worthless things to people for exorbitant amounts of money, while laughing in their faces for it, became integral to modern art. This sort of makes sense. If you were a modern artist, the only more powerful and shocking thing than getting a conceptual joke accepted by an art gallery (Duchampโs urinal in New Yorkโs Grand Central Palace), is to have someone pay tons of money for it. โฆ For the rich, art is an asset class like real estate, bonds or stocks. They need wealth planning around it. And so, auction houses changed to offer just that, offering collectors lines of credit and allowing them to borrow against the value of their collections. The result is that the prices for contemporary art keep going up, which attracts even more buyers, many of them drawn in by the potential for speculation and a better tax plan.
Art is older than agriculture. โฆ The extinct animals of the ice age donโt only exist as fossils, or frozen remains from Siberia. They also live in art.
The Supper at Emmaus: A coded symbol hidden in a masterpiece, via Richard Bledsoe at Remodern Review
The visual arts are in a crisis of relevance, largely due to dire mismanagement by our cultural institutions. Instead of being encouraged as a communion for all, for over a century many art administrators have favored art as a divider, an opportunity to flaunt elitist attitudes. Officially sanctioned art often emphasizes theoretical formal matters and sociological notions designed to exclude, rather than engage, the general public.
Abstraction underwent a process of gentrification. Once it was the rough slum of the art world. But the elitists seized on it as a way to differentiate themselves from the general public they despised. Abstract art enabled an elitist crony system. Art world insiders got to pick and choose which people they acknowledged as โartistsโ.
A recent major restoration on a painting by Vermeer exposes hidden details that completely change its meaning.
Itโs not hard to tell that OโKeeffe was the eye behind the imagesโand not just because the majority of them feature the same beloved New Mexican landscapes and flora that populate her paintings. Her signature sense of composition is there, too. You can recognize it in the way she photographs the bodily curves of riverbeds and adobe homes, or in her fascination with the long, graphic shadows that dramatize the desert every morning and afternoon. Her ability to capture natureโs feminine grace remains unparalleled.
Churchill was a fanatical Sunday painter, in additional to all his other efforts in defense of Western civilization.
A new exhibit highlights the work of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington:
Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington are both mythic American artists. Their artworks represent what โ for differing groups of art critics and consumers โ have come to be seen as defining products of an โAmerican art.โ Homer is seen to represent the East Coast, with his crashing waves and stoic Atlantic fisher folk, and Remington the West, with his roughneck ranch hands and romanticized Native American braves.
Iโd argue that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society in part because so many people have not been taught or donโt bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. Weโre overpoliticized while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured.
โย David Brooks, from โHow Art Creates Usโ (NY Times, January 26, 2024)