Tag Archives: Diego Velasquez

historic surprises

Unless we grasp that the historical process can always take men and their societies by surprise, we shall fail to understand our own immediate dangers, or indeed, our opportunities. Tides can suddenly break old barriers in a matter of hours … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

hold your nose: flushing into a non-existant past

Excerpts from a brilliant article exposing the underside of what Adorno called the “cultural industries” and what Kuspit refers to as art as part of the industrial entertainment complex so drowned and subsumed by money values there is strictly form … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

banking with igor: foreclosure on bad anima

It gives rise to strange sensations when we transfer the body into an emotional language, a coded language that no longer seems common. Maybe it reveals a certain vulgar emotional truth about our own perceived deformities as well as providing … Continue reading

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

collapsing the geometric order

The search for emotional impact. Classicism and romanticism are only tenuously compatible. Like Cain and Abel, its a contrapuntal piece of music, that if played often enough, like Glenn Gould with Bach, can create some some odd exposures to the … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

meninas: sweeping out our house

Same shit. Different day.The tragic waltz of nihilism to achieve a kind of purification, a kind of radical immanence. Kitschified and recyclable. It sells. The grotesque arranged for esthetic profit. Artistically, it reflects the love hate relationship with the modern … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

play it again zorba: the crocodile cure

Its a bit ambivalent.  Michael Lewis applying the screws to the Greek population. Fatuous moral righteousness with  the cruel guile that only Ugly American can muster.A targeted assassination of an un-people.  Not that descriptively the proof is in the pudding. … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

grim tidings: disasters and masters of war

A preoccupation with mystery, violence and the irrational was always present in Goya’s art. As the years passed, casual observations of the foibles and horrors of the world were transfigured into a vision of life that came to dominate his … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Los caprichos: a wasteland of reason

But if Francisco Goya saw vice, corruption and foolishness in high places, Goya, unlike many of his contemporaries in France and England , did not discover a compensatory nobility in the common man. In fact, the contrary. His first great … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

viscious frailties at the most extreme

At the Spanish court, Goya was advantageously placed to observe vicious frailties at their most extreme. At the time that he became Painter of the Household, Charles IV had just succeeded to the throne in place of an elder brother … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

an enemy of irrational tendencies

Goya’s life was split in two near its midpoint by an illness that very nearly killed him when he was forty-six years old. If he had died, he would have left a large body of work establishing him as one … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment