Tag Archives: Damien Hirst

art for the sake of creative destruction

Consciousness of the all-mighty dollar is pretty pervasive, even overwhelming. In the modern art world it informs aesthetic and spiritual content like everything else in society, conquering art such that art itself is a pure commodity, a sub-species of money … Continue reading

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the burden

by Art Chantry: chris burden embodies everything  i love and hate about the fine art world. his work is sensational and violent and ‘destructo ‘- total BOY stuff. i love it to death. but, it’s also completely and utterly shallow … Continue reading

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muse and the economy

Or is it the economy and the muse? When individuals are fighting tooth and nail for a living, they look on the arts as a thing apart. Has our affluent society today carried over some of this disdain into a … Continue reading

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deep philosophy or conceptual quip?

The greatest philosopher in modern art? Or did the art world make him, artificially construct him into a “readymade” himself, the philosopher who would trash tradition and under the pretext of modernism and the new, engage in the kind of … Continue reading

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modernism: press the refresh button

Modernism as a ready made. The break with the past; the discarding of tradition. The shock of the new. Modernism struck at the heart of the conventional wisdom in the arts which meant that an aesthetic of plot, dramatic incident … Continue reading

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doing battle with the muse: not a-mused

Is it intrinsic to modern art in general, a kind of withdrawal into a space, a locus of narcissistic preoccupation and obligation? A space where fear of the object leads to mistreatment of it. The aggressive and destructive impulses, which … Continue reading

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those special shades

by Art Chantry last night i again watched one of of my favorite director’s (john carpenter) best movies – THEY LIVE! when it was first released in 1988, it was reviewed as the first “anti-yuppie” movie of the reagan era. … Continue reading

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art as locusts: hunters and gatherers

Way back when, the French Salon had commodified painting as merchandise and the Salon itself became a gigantic salesroom, for at best inconsequential work of men sometimes technically gifted who understood the manipulation of trite, generic formula mixed with an … Continue reading

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the pain and beauty of it all

Poignant. Heart tugging. Hard to imagine that an immensely talented artist like Edward Landseer, a technical gymnast and stuntman could waste time plumbing the depths of anecdotal gimmick. A weird tryst between feeding increasingly affluent purchasers with the most tacky … Continue reading

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full circle

Sometimes things become intertwined in a full circle that initially escapes us since the assumed understanding is based on enlightenment principles guided by the linear progression of science and technology where evolution is rational and explainable. In Donald Kuspit’s The … Continue reading

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