An elderly woman has destroyed a 19th-century Spanish fresco in a botched restoration conducted without permission. — The Independent “Restoration conducted without permission” = ignorant destruction of artistic treasures. This is why it pays to leave art restoration to trained professionals. Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Art
MOCA Cookie Crumbles
Ed Ruscha has resigned as a MOCA trustee, as have John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie, leaving no artists on the museum’s board. — latimes.com, July 17, 2012 “Art” and “artist” are words that get tossed around pretty lightly. Ruscha‘s work — and the same goes for Baldessari and Kruger — consists of modifying photos and other images, often by writing words on them. It’s like lolcats, minus the occasional wit. Opie is a photographer whose work is less interesting than the average high school yearbook. Yesterday, the image below was posted on the MOCA Facebook page. It’s an actual museum piece called “Earthwork aka Untitled (Dirt).” Yes, it looks like a pile of dirt, but if you click the image to enlarge it, you can see that it’s actually — a pile of dirt! This is risk-taking art, the risk being that the cleaning crew may accidentally sweep… Read more →
Another Guy Who Didn’t Get the Memo on the American Dream
“Anywhere there’s a hardware store I can make money. . . . My art was dormant. Then one day they told me I was laid off from my construction job, and thank goodness.” Sounds like another guy who didn’t get the memo that America is “no longer the land of opportunity” and “the ‘American dream’ is a myth.” Read more →
Aside
ShortList Magazine: The 50 Coolest Book Covers Ever
Which is More Valuable: Collaboration or Competence?
The title of this post makes a good interview question. Usually, the candidate will say something to the effect of “they’re both valuable” to avoid the possibility of slipping up and choosing the one that the interviewer believes is less valuable. Let’s say we need to get a picture painted. We could say, “Picasso — you’re our best guy in this area. We’d like you to paint the picture for us.” Or we could say, “Picasso — work with the steering committee to get that picture painted.” You could make a case for either approach, but you can’t do both. So which is more valuable? Personally, I think collaboration is overrated. It leads to the knowledge of experts and novices being given equal weight. There’s a reason why pilots don’t invite passengers into the cockpit to get their opinions on how to fly the plane . . . Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Five Guys in Europe: Museums
Museums: Chocolate and Picasso . . . Read more →
Graduation Still Life
Time passes. Listen. Time passes. . . . — Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood Unlike Paul Cézanne, I didn’t spend hours setting this up. I captured it just the way it looked when I came downstairs this morning. As one chapter ends, another begins. For the kids — most of them — the next chapter is college; for the parents, old age and death. Happy Thursday, everybody! Read more →
Joyeux Anniversaire, Paul Cézanne
Today is Paul Cézanne’s 172nd birthday! Did you know that Cézanne sometimes spent hours positioning objects before painting a still life? He did! Read more →
Genius Takes a Walk
The Conceptualists would answer: It’s not permanence and materials, all that Winsor & Newton paint and other crap, that are at the heart of art, but two things only: Genius and the process of creation! Later they decided that Genius might as well take a walk, too. — Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word Read more →
Joyeux Anniversaire, Manet!
History painting, what a joke! There is only one authentic thing: to paint what you see. — Édouard Manet (Jan 23, 1832 – Apr 30, 1883) Read more →
Twitter: 2009-12-11
RT @smithsonian: A city built from $32k of discarded lottery tickets? Artist Jean Shin did it. Watch her work: http://ow.ly/L0oN # Read more →
Twitter: 2009-12-09
RT @smithsonian: How about a slide show of artists’ homemade holiday cards? http://ow.ly/Ki2k # Read more →
Twitter: 2009-11-11
RT @MOCAlosangeles: MOCA ? YOU! Complimentary Museum Admission | SUNDAY, NOV 15–FRIDAY, NOV 20 | more info at http://bit.ly/46urQb # If Jimmy cracks corn, and no one cares, why does he keep doing it? # No hell, no dignity, no hope. Have a great day! # My wife's in LA at the Thai markets. She'll bring back those little coconut pancakes. I love coconut pancakes! # Read more →
The Myth of the Natural Genius
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. — Emile Zola People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times. — Mozart Read more →
Imagine Finding Me
Visual artist Chino Otsuka has created composite images of her past and present selves, like a digital time machine. This is so good. Otsuka’s work has restored my faith in humanity, which was pulverized a couple of days ago by the news that Ashton Kutcher has a million followers on Twitter. I have a rule of thumb about art and artists: If a normal person has no hope of seeing the point of your work without an accompanying explanation about you and your artistic “theory” — you suck. I look at Otsuka’s photos and with no words at all I’m immediately transported, I’m weeping with joy at the possibilities of life . . . If, again I have a chance to meet, there is so much I want to ask and so much I want to tell. — Chino Otsuka If you could go back and meet yourself as… Read more →
Art and Technology
We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for a real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue. — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Read more →
Naked People on a Glacier
In this image supplied by Greenpeace, U.S. artist Spencer Tunick and Greenpeace Switzerland present hundreds of naked people to symbolize the vulnerability of glaciers under climate change. Is that what it’s supposed to symbolize? What did it symbolize when he photographed hundreds of naked people in Venezuela, France, Britain, etc., etc., etc. Isn’t anyone else bored out of their minds with this idiot yet? He’s like that miscreant who dresses up Weimaraners, and everyone else who has one limited idea and keeps repeating it over and over and over. I don’t claim to be a great artist, but let me tell you how this glacier shoot should have been done: You put the hundreds of people on the glacier, at which time they discover to their dismay that they’re stuck there like a tongue on a lamppost. You leave them there to slowly starve to death and decompose. It reeks… Read more →
The Finer Things in Life
One thing you can’t help noticing in spending a day at LACMA, what with the proximity to West Hollywood and all, is that gay guys really like art. I mentioned that to my son and his response was “Case in point: you,” which wasn’t very nice. He’s not much of an art lover . . . I admit that I occasionally drag him along to an art museum, because I feel like he should know at least a little bit about it whether he likes it or not. On our way back to Orange County — in keeping with my mission of introducing the boy to the finer things in life — we stopped off at the original Tommy’s stand at Beverly and Rampart, not only an L.A. landmark, but a favorite of USC students for decades, where you can still get — as the boy did — a double… Read more →
A Day at LACMA
We drove out to LACMA last weekend to see The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950, and Re-SITE-ing the West: Contemporary Photographs from the Permanent Collection. I love exhibits like this . . . I’ve lived in California my whole life and I feel like these Western landscapes are part of my DNA. While we were there, we also took in the Dan Flavin retrospective. Flavin’s work consists of standard fluorescent tubes arranged in patterns not beyond the imagination of the average six-year-old. I tried viewing them up close, far away, from the side . . . I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it. LACMA helpfully provided a detailed theory of Flavin’s work in the form of a fold-out brochure with a lot of small print, but I didn’t read it. Isn’t art supposed to provide some sort of pleasure and/or illumination — pardon the pun — on… Read more →
Blessed Art Thou
In case you don’t recognize the woman in the painting, it’s Angelina Jolie (as the Virgin Mary) with her kids, hovering in the heavens above a Wal-Mart. Read more →