Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
In case you’ve been missing it, Art News Blog has quite an interesting discussion on religious art here, as a follow-up to an earlier post here. The posts are generating quite a lot of interesting comments as well. I am going to think a bit more about the threads before weighing in fully, but I think the conclusion that ANB arrives at that all art is necessarily religious is a bit problematic to say the least. (Walter Michael Miller said something similar to me in the beginning of my interview with him.) More on this soon.
See artforum and The Oregonian. With his name, I must assume he is Jewish, but I can’t find much about his biography. Does anyone have more information?
The NY Times‘ Hugh Eakin reviews Sharon Waxman’s new book Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World. Eakin observes:
The larger problem is Waxman’s portrayal of the antiquities crisis as mainly a “tug of war” over coveted museum pieces. In fact, the more important battle concerns unprotected archaeological sites, and it is far less a matter of repatriating objects than of figuring out how to stop latter-day looters from destroying our collective past. That vital challenge remains unsolved.
This is a good observation; we can hardly take the entire effort of restitution seriously if it has nothing to say about contemporary looting. But in such a large battle as this perhaps even little victories matter.
Slate’s Ron Rosenbaum thinks so (”Oppenheimer, our Faust!” yet the libretto was “pedestrian”), and Greg Sandow agrees on ArtsJournal. Both Rosenbaum’s and Sandow’s pieces are well worth reading. My review is forthcoming (I will post it next week when it runs, and yes it has a Jewish angle), but I will just say now that for all of its faults, I was really moved by some of the music. The opera site is here.
According to a release from the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, MOCRA is now on Facebook (link here) and MySpace (link here).
The Icelandic art student studying in Canada who planted a fake bomb outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (pictured) probably had no idea why everyone was so riled up by his work. According to the CBC, the student “said he wanted people to think about where art is placed and how that changes their view of it. He described it as a conceptual art piece, using plastic, wood and glass and a video.”
Thank God for the judge, who saw through the “theory” and said in court that the piece was “a really stupid act, even for a young person.” I wonder, though, why there cannot be some sort of judge in the academy that could help prevent this sort of thinking from the start. Of course art should stop where free speech does–at the point where it gets dangerous. Fake art bombs are pretty similar to yelling “fire” in a theater.
Yet, the tragedy of the piece at the Toronto museum is also an art one. The student actually thought that a piece that simply interrogated how placement of art impacts the object was itself a piece of art. Not only should any rational adult know that planting something that could be mistaken for a bomb in a public place (especially post 9/11) is a stupid idea, but it should also be obvious that such a project is immature art as well. Perhaps a sociologist or a political psychologist would be interested in people’s responses to the piece, but if artists have grown so interested in all that surrounds art to the exclusion of the work of art itself, that is tragic.
Given the choice between an ideal world where artists could comfortably create works like this without causing a stir and one where artists were smart enough to know this was a foolish idea, I’d not hesitate for the latter.
Which offer “a bit of hope and a splash of color to a city whose signature hue is oatmeal brown.”
Bridget writes on Eye Level (the official blog of SAAM) about Simon Sparrow’s “Assemblage with Found Objects” (see here, close-ups here).
“In this assemblage Sparrow has accumulated a variety of objects and strategically placed them in a wooden frame that he carved and painted gold,” writes Bridget. “Every time I look at the piece I either see something new or think about the piece in a different way.”
Bridget does reference the soulful aspect, which SAAM elaborates on:
Simon Sparrow believed his images came from God, and before he started to paint, he would let his mind go blank so the spirit could enter. He described this process as “sweeter than anything on earth … I feel like I’m climbing.” He did not paint representational portraits, but used a variety of found objects instead to create glittering images of people’s souls. He related his method to West African traditions, in which the gods have “inner eyes” to see much more than just physical appearance.
It’s interesting to me that neither the blog nor the SAAM ‘Artworks in Our Collection’ site mentions how the piece itself looks like a religious icon with its gold frame and symbolic forms. There seems to be a religious angle to the work itself — not simply in the artist’s quote.
“Or within cultures sustained by a theist population,” writes John Mark Reynolds in “Sad News for Extreme Atheism.”
He founded the Center for Jewish Art. (HT: jewish-heritage-travel)
Though a Catholic spokesman says it’s moisture in the air.
The curator says the show “grew out of a desire to explore the multiple meanings of spirituality in contemporary art.” Story and photo (of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” [Go-Go Dancing Platform], 1991) from Artdaily.org.
In the New York Times’ blog, Paper Cuts: A Blog About Books, Barry Gewen reviews George Packer’s play, “Betrayed.” As he describes it, the play is about Iraqis who support the American invasion, but then are “broken on the wheel of bureaucratic and military cruelty” when they help the American occupying forces.
In the piece, which ran last April, Gewen writes that he was so swayed that “when the play was over, I wanted to rush out into the street, grab everyone I encountered by the shoulders and shout at them, ‘We’ve got to do something to help those people!’”
This leads Gewen to question whether the play has become something other than art:
There’s no question that “Betrayed” is propaganda — effective propaganda, to be sure, propaganda that rouses your emotions, propaganda on the side of the good guys. But does its message-y, agitprop nature defeat the possibility of its being anything grander?
Gewen seems to sense that he is treading on dangerous territory, so he poses the question to his readers whether they can think of works created as propaganda that have risen to the level of art. The comments are quite insightful. A Don Williams points out, “‘Propaganda’ comes from the Catholic idea of propagating the faith. Obviously, many of our paintings from the Middle Ages were commissioned as works of religious propaganda.” Other candidates mentioned in the comments include Dylan, Arthur Miller, John Dos Passos and Jack London.
I have often called work propaganda, but when I try to be honest with myself I find that it is often hard to separate effectiveness from propaganda, especially when I don’t want to believe what the artist is arguing. Part of me wishes Gewen would have done a better job of defining what makes something propaganda, but clearly he got the feeling from “Betrayed” that it was propagandistic. Maybe that’s the only way to separate art and propaganda–from the sort of taste it leaves in your mouth.
And is stylistically “completely alien to Goya,” reports the Independent.
Or about double its expected auction price, reports Carol Vogel.
For those who didn’t have a chance to listen in live, click here to hear my interview with Bea Fields of Y-Talk Radio and Millennial Leaders. Bea is absolutely wonderful, and the interview was a lot of fun. You can subscribe to various feeds and podcasts on her site to hear the rest of her great interviews. Or click on the icon below:
(UPDATE) Evidently the Blog Talk Radio link updates, so to hear my interview you must go through this link.
I will be interviewing with Bea Fields, author of Millennial Leaders, on Y-Talk Radio. You can listen in here on Wednesday 5/7/2008 at 11:00 p.m. (though it’s at 7 p.m. DC time, so perhaps it will be live then).
UPDATE: The interview has been moved to Monday 5/12/2008 at 7:00 PM. Link for listening in here.
[Santa Maria Times] The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is showing works commemorating F. Bailey Vanderhoef Jr.’s and Wilbur L. Cummings Jr.’s 1938 journey (info here) to Tibet to document religious art.
[Bloomberg] “The Golden Age of German Romanticism'’ at Musee de la Vie Romantique shows a different side of Romanticism, including works of the Catholic group, the Nazarenes, who “attempted to revive religious art of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.”
[Pewsitter] Hugh McNichol calls for “quality reintegration of well-executed artistic pieces” in Catholic churches.
[Islamic Republic News Agency] Iran and Japan team up for calligraphy at the Imam Ali (AS) Religious Art Museum in Tehran.
[AP] $90,863: the latest auction value of Holocaust-looted work.
[Daily News Record] It seems unlikely, but this writer feels Eastern Mennonite University is showing “anti-Mennonite” art.
(Image: Stushie’s Art.)
Israeli artist Ra’anan Levy’s “Expulsion from Eden” (pictured) is one of his pieces on exhibit at the Janos Gat Gallery in New York in the show “Sinks and Spaces.”
ARTINFO posts a few more of the pieces as well, including one called “The Seducer.”
I wonder what the artist has to say about the Edenic reference…
This is one is 2001-2002, and it is the Old City of Jerusalem.
Julie Randle of the South County Journal conducted a great interview with David Brinker, assistant director of the Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA). My only complaint is the two talked about everything but religious art…
Although often wonderfully scandalous and provocative, new studies in provenance are sometimes like losing old friends. The newest victim is Goya’s “Colossus,” which is noticeably absent from the Prado’s “Goya In Times Of War,” reports the Independent (UK).
The exclusion of the work isn’t just an oversight. The Prado’s director said in an interview with ABC, “Our knowledge of Goya’s work has advanced greatly in recent years, and doubts over the attribution of El Coloso are widely accepted by the museum’s scientific team.”
What’s next, claiming Saturn Devouring His Son is really by Boucher? Oh how the mighty have fallen…
Image: WebMuseum.
My article “The Atheist and the Crucifix” (in Relevant Magazine) has been translated into Hungarian by El Mondo. According to the editor Gabor Gyura, El Mondo is a paper for students and intellectuals, which “mainly focuses on society, religion and arts. Our goal is to collect some ideas that are ‘avantgard’ in Hungary and always try to show our readers some thoughts from international press.”
Here’s another Google Trends analysis. Blue is searches for “God,” red is “Devil,” orange is “Satan,” and green is “anti-Christ.”
(UPDATE) Reader Jaclyn insightfully notes, “I like how devil looks like devil horns.”
“One of my favourite paintings in the National Gallery was once owned by Hitler - is it wrong to still love it?” wonders the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones of “Cupid Complaining to Venus” by Lucas Cranach the Elder (about 1525).
Artdaily.org has the story about the National Gallery investigating whether the piece has the troubling provenance. According to the release from NG:
The National Gallery now wishes to establish how and when Cranach’s Cupid complaining to Venus came to be in Hitler’s collection. The National Gallery is continuing its investigations to find this out. Any information from the public would be gratefully received.
“When its full story is told it may even end up leaving the gallery and being resold abroad,” Jones concludes, citing Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm episode on Wagner along the way, “so I’ll enjoy it while I can.” See also the Guardian’s coverage here.
Here is an item from artforum which I’m posting in full, because it makes no sense to me:
INDIA REFUSES MEESE SCULPTURE
A sculpture by Jonathan Meese has been turned away at the Indian border. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s Swantje Karich reports, Indian customs officials at Mumbai airport took a “drastic” approach to Meese’s bronze sculpture Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You, 2007, which was en route to the gallery Mirchandani + Steinruecke for inclusion in the exhibition “General Sweetie.” According to Karich, the dealers attempted to persuade the airport customs officials to let the work through by citing “traditional Indian erotic literature.” Just as the shipment was due to be checked again, the commission in charge gave up and simply sent the sculpture back to Germany.
Express of India’s piece is a bit more clear.
