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Posts filed under magazine
Feeding the Nile
The elephant in the room is literally a thick-ish magazine called Elephant that’s been jammed amongst other publications in my apartment for the last three months. I’ve finally gotten around to reading/addressing this Elephant (Issue 5, Winter 2010/2011), and found two parts of the book seemingly at odds with one another; both attempting to answer… (read more)
humour me just this once
In the Exhibit book for “Rude Britannia”, shown at Tate Britain earlier, the director of the Tate, Penelope Curtis, states matter-of-factly that “Understanding humour is never easy and understanding in a historical sense is especially difficult.”. Except, well, I don’t think it’s difficult at all, understanding humour, especially in “a” historical sense. In fact, history… (read more)
calling all collections
Ikon Gallery violated one of my pet peeves from cultural institutions by organising a retrospective of its own existence. Ordinarily the realm of magazine publishers through distribution of anniversary issues, releasing new content is fairly non-existent. It’s like going to your granny’s 90th birthday where she recounts her memories of every year. In the end,… (read more)
whither museum
Take comfort, common man and woman, in knowing that the world’s finest museums and galleries are thinking about the plural “you” and your struggles in appreciating art. Don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not that they’re interested in your opinion. If they wanted that, as the saying almost goes, they’d box it up in a… (read more)
beginning, meet end
Pubs are probably a fertile incubation space for art. All sorts of unhinged, but nonetheless possibly valid ideas begin life in a pub amongst friends, usually after at least four quick pints. Laced with alcohol, people say the most outrageous things which nearly always require proof of concept outside the fantasy world of your local… (read more)
free psychoanalysis…thank you art.
“In 1992, he commenced a series of strands of low-watt white lightbulbs, which he strung along walls or vertically, from ceilings. Alluding to purity, spirituality, and enlightenment, these delicate and flaccid garlands, which willfully surrender to the forces of gravity, are also a campy commentary on the phallic underpinnings of numerous Minimalist creations, particularly Dan… (read more)
more math for artists
As an artist – as a hungry, wanting, miserable-existing, low-rent-living, desperately seeking appreciation artist – wouldn’t you want to have maximum exposure so that any one of us buyers and lovers of art might catch on that you, well, exist? More philosophically, if you have a showing of your work, and it lasts only one… (read more)
stop following me!
Just how far would an artist go to alienate his followers, to the point of eliminating even the mildest of interest in the work? I can guess your first response. I’m discounting the witless wonders who produce harebrained art while claiming canonical importance, when nearly every left and right brain thinker (not including the sycophants… (read more)
manufacturing nature through art
I don’t quite understand the idea of trompe l’oeil, the french phrase for fooling the eye. Other than the obvious: to prove you can make something so good it fools others into thinking art is reality, it seems to be more science than art. To be accomplished at it is to be technically skilled, and… (read more)
art for one
Attention all artists: stop the inconsequential discussion with yourselves in the secluded and singular vacuum World Of One. The reason nobody understands what you’re doing is very simple to explain: your work doesn’t mean anything to anyone but you. This is not public art. It’s not even contextual art. It’s Art for One. I hope… (read more)
Art World is on another planet
Sorry, this one is too short by a guilty mile, but I had to get it in before my eyes rolled rightside in my head. In the June/July issue of Art World is an interview with Carl Andre; a guy who uses bricks and mortar like no brickie could. Here’s the quote verbatim, from the… (read more)
a quantum of soul-less
In the never-ending comparison between men and women, to me the variations are never as stark as they are dramatically overblown. That philosophy proved to be true at the Pompidou Centre’s “Elle’s@centrepompidou” exhibition this past week. Unfortunately, that’s a bad thing for women. The works displayed were all 20th and 21st century pieces by women… (read more)
tale of two sculptures
Generally I’ve found sculpture to be thick, pointless and questionable. Whenever you hear someone ask, “Why is that called art?”, it’s likely that person is pondering incredulously at a sculpture. I don’t know how they get away with it, but sculpture artists have the seemingly unlimited ability to cloud our sense of beauty and poetry… (read more)
stop laughing and get serious
Artist : Camille Rose Garcia Of the stable of art magazines written for the western world, my favourite, and probably the most humble and true, is Juxtapoz; a monthly published out of San Francisco. Two separate, but similar comments in the May 2009 issue made complete sense to me regarding the focus of art in… (read more)
art in your head
Contemporary art, it seems to me, requires contemporary creativity. I don’t mean from the contemporary artists’ point of view, I’m assuming they have an abundance. I mean from us folk: the contemporary viewers struggling to understand contemporary art in this oh so contemporary world. You can never know what the artist means through their peculiar… (read more)
old media explains contemporary art
“…the designer always has a recipient in mind, but an artist has a different, non-utilitarian agenda and it opens up enormous possibilities for new language.” (from Art World, April/May 2009)