What’s wrong with today’s “protest art”—which occupies so much of our public space? Mainly this: it’s long on protest and virtually devoid of art. That sad fact has been vividly demonstrated of late by two New York exhibitions: Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World (closed January 7 at the Guggenheim) and An […]
Ai Weiwei, animal cruelty in "art", conceptual art, Dread Scott, Elizabeth Catlett, Guggenheim Museum, Henry Flynt, Liu Xiaodong, Marcel Duchamp, Martha Rosier, Melvin Edwards, Paul Cadmus, protest art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Wang Xingwei, Whitney MuseumMarcel Duchamp’s signed urinal dubbed Fountain isn’t a work of art, “conceptual” or otherwise.1 Neither is Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet dubbed America (offered on loan by the Guggenheim Museum to the White House last year, in lieu of a painting by Vincent van Gogh that had been requested). They are mere artworld stunts. Isn’t it […]
contemporary art, gold toilet, Guggenheim Museum, Marcel Duchamp, Maurizio Cattelan, Nancy SpectorGoogle “Ayn Rand’s theory of art,” and the second item you will find [as of this writing] is an article with that title in the online magazine Hyperallergic. Published in September 2012, the article—which prominently cites the book I co-authored on Rand’s theory—has been known to me for some time. But it is such a […]
AICA-USA, art and politics, Ayn Rand's theory of art, Hyperallergic, Jillian Steinhauer, What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn RandSome time ago, I received a message through my website contact form that was headed “Looking for Possibility to Translate Your Book into Chinese.” Needless to say, I was delighted. After introducing himself as Chen Guang Wang, a Chinese émigré in his third year as a student of Visual Art at the Emily Carr University of […]
Chen Guang Wang, Chinese translation, contemporary art in China, understanding contemporary artThis week, September 10–16, is National Arts in Education Week—an annual event established by Congress in 2010 to celebrate the value of the arts in education and gain broad support for it. On what grounds could any civilized member of society object? The answer is that the value of arts education largely depends on the […]
4'33", Jeff Koons, John Cage, National Art Education Association, National Arts in Education Week, Oliver Herring, Richard Kessler, STEM to STEAMTwo exhibitions this spring have powerfully belied the artworld pretense that all contemporary art is in an anti-traditional “cutting-edge” vein. And unlike the contemporary work that fills today’s leading museums and galleries, they offer art lovers something to rejoice in. The smaller of the two shows is Self-Portrait (April 20 – June 20)—at the Eleventh Street […]
art education, Art Renewal Center, Classical Realism, contemporary art, self-portraitsThe phenomenon of fake news is on everyone’s lips in the realm of politics these days, but the equivalent of fake art in the contemporary artworld has yet to be adequately reckoned with. Google the term and you’ll find ample news of forgeries—work imitating that by famous artists and passed off as actually by them. […]
anti-art, Combines, Erased de Kooning Drawing, fake art, fake news, Leah Dickerman, MoMA, Monogram, RauschenbergEvery year around this time, the Metropolitan Museum of Art trots out its conception of “contemporary art,” in a specially commissioned work for its rooftop terrace. This year’s example is an architectural installation entitled PsychoBarn, by the British artworld star Cornelia Parker—“whose work is in museums around the world,” notes the New York Times. In […]
Cornelia Parker, Met rooftop, PsychoBarnYou’ve probably heard of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Match Girl” [full text]. But don’t confuse that touching fictional character with my “Little Mattress Girl,” a live person of quite a different order. She is Emma Sulkowicz, the former Columbia University student of visual arts who gained national notoriety in 2014–15 for an “endurance performance” piece […]
Is the infamous urinal signed “R. Mutt” (featured as the centerpiece on the cover of Who Says That’s Art?) really the brainchild of Marcel Duchamp, as the artworld has long claimed? Or was it instead merely a copy by him of a piece originally created by a relatively obscure figure of the early twentieth-century avant-garde—a […]
conceptual art, contemporary art, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Fountain, Glyn Thompson, Julian Spalding, Marcel Duchamp, readymades, urinal
