I first heard of Ken Lansing in 2002 at the annual convention of the National Art Education Association. In the Q&A of a session entitled “Educating the Museum Educator,” I suggested that not everything displayed in art museums nowadays truly qualifies as art. Following the session, I was approached by a colleague who introduced himself […]
Kenneth M. Lansing, 1925–2022:
Art History Gone Amuck
Widely used art history textbooks such as Gardner’s Art through the Ages present a distorted narrative of visual art from the early twentieth century on. They focus on countless modernist and postmodernist inventions—from “abstract art” to “conceptual art” and “performance art”—at the expense of traditionally representational painting and sculpture. The result is an utterly incoherent […]
abstract art, Academic Questions (journal), avant-garde, conceptual art, Gardner's Art through the Ages, performance art, traditional artJousting with Mark Rothko’s Son
Christopher Rothko—the highly affable son of the famed not-so-affable Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970)—has written a volume of essays lovingly re-examining his father’s life and work. Entitled Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out, it was published last November by Yale University Press, and its author has been promoting it with a passion inspired by […]
abstract art, Christopher Rothko, Mark Rothko, modern art, Rothko Chapel