Tag Archives: Robert Hughes

homer: arcadia americana

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Dave

It’s art that arrives at its destination from the outside and then pays attention to observation. Homer is part of the strong figurative tradition in American art, and although appropriated as a popular stereotype it reaches back to older, quite … Continue reading →

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged Andrew Gough, David Teniers, Henry James, josh kroeker, jules prown, Levon Helm, Mark Twain, Robert Hughes, Walt Whitman | Leave a comment

getting your irish up: the bog trotters

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Dave

In the last few hundred years, dark-skinned peoples have been likened to apes in an effort to dehumanize them and give some form of reasoning behind their oppression and general use . This is not unfamiliar to most Americans as … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged arthur young, ernest renan, James Gillray, Liam Greenslade, Mary Shelley, Michael de Nie, Robert Hughes, robert knox, rory gallagher, sheridan gilley, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Rowlandson, Thorstein Veblen, William Heath | Leave a comment

those were the days

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Dave

In The End of Art, Donald Kuspit argues that art is over because it has lost its aesthetic import. Art has been replaced by ‘postart’, a term invented by Alan Kaprow, as a new visual category that elevates the banal … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged ann sinclair, Arnold Toynbee, barnett newman, Clement Greenberg, D.H. Lawrence, Damien Hirst, david kotz, dominique strauss kahn, Donald Kuspit, emmanuel asare, emmet cole, Franz Kafka, giovanni battista vico, jeffrey gundlach, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marcel Duchamp, Matt Taibbi, michael lallana, occupy wall street, Oswald Spengler, Robert Hughes, sandy weill, Sigmund Freud, steven mandala, steven rattner, susan antilla, T.S. Eliot, Vibram You Are The Technology campaign | Leave a comment

9/11: reaching for the noble among the ruins

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Dave

Politics in art seems almost inevitable, especially the emotional issue surrounding 9/11, national identity and larger geopolitical concerns which with the unfolding of the Arab Spring, perhaps a metaphor for “regime change”, bring to light an arc of economically motivated … Continue reading →

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged Andrew Wyeth, graydon parrish, Hilton Kramer, Jackson Pollock, james f. cooper, Jeff Koons, John Everett Millais, John William Waterhouse, masatomo kuriya, N.C. Wyeth, new britain museum of american art, nicolas serota, philippe de montebello, Robert Hughes, Steve Reich, steve reich wtc 9/11, Walter Benjamin, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, wtc 10th anniversary | Leave a comment

kitsch and the scandal of discovery

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Dave

Maybe its about our ingrained habits of denying what we know, but don’t want to know.What could be termed disavowal. A dark, musty zone between knowing and unknowing. There is nothing sexually overt in John Currin’s paintings, an absence of … Continue reading →

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged Andy Warhol, Donald Kuspit, Edouard Manet, Gerhard Richter, john currin, John Haber, kim levin, Lucas Cranach, Lucian Freud, Martin Gayford, Norman Rockwell, rachel feinstein, Robert Hughes, Roy Lichtenstein | Leave a comment

freudian slide into nihilism

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Dave

Maybe the problem is a mimicry of art historical forms without connecting to the poetic myths that animated and gave life to these forms. That is, the aura of the profound is a falsification in that the depth of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged Auguste Rodin, Charles Baudelaire, D.W. Winnicott, Diego Rivera, Francis Bacon, Frans Hals, Jacob Epstein, Jonathan Jones Guardian, kitty garman, Lucian Freud, Martin Gayford, Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, Robert Hughes, Sigmund Freud, Sir Kenneth Clark, spruiell, Vincent Van Gogh, william grimes | Leave a comment

modigliani: mad, bad but a light burning bright

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Dave

Very interesting take on a comparison between Modigliani and Picasso by Donald Kuspit. The point of departure could be Nietzsche’s oft-cited quote that “god is dead” and with him the head of morality also fell from the guillotine into the … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged amedeo modigliani, brad gooch, Brancusi, Chaim Soutine, Donald Kuspit, douglas hall, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Jacob, meryle secrest, Meyer Schapiro, Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Robert Hughes | Leave a comment

wearing a mask that grins and lies

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Dave

We often have a sometimes contradictory and ambiguous relationship to popular culture. In one way, its potentially powerful means to share knowledge and criticize consumer society across different boundaries in an oppositional and sometimes subversive manner. However, against this backdrop, … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged Allan Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Bell Hooks, Frantz Fanon, franz fanon, Grace Lee Boggs, jane campion, jean michel basquiet, jodie foster, joseph heath, Joshua Glenn, Julian Schnabel, norman kelley, Norman Mailer, Robert Hughes, Theodor Adorno, Thomas Frank, thomas frank the baffler, zora neale hurston | Leave a comment

drawing on pre-human sources

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Dave

Its an old idea. The typical John Doe sees an abstract expressionist painting, and explains to himself that there is no justice in this world. Why should the likes of Willam de Kooning, Jackson Pollock et al. be so immortalized … Continue reading →

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged Abstract expressionism, Andres Serrano, angelina hawley-dolan, Arshile Gorky, barnett newman, Clement Greenberg, dada manifesto, Dada Movement, deborah mensah-bonsu, ellen winner, hans hoffman, Harold Rosenberg, Jackson Pollock, JMW Turner, John Canaday, John Ruskin, Joseph Mallord William Turner, lee krasner, Marcel Duchamp, Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso, robert coates, Robert Hughes, Tristan Tzara, Wassily Kandinsky, willem de Kooning | Leave a comment

duchess of alba: seven year fling

Posted on March 12, 2011 by Dave

At about the time that Goya began work on the “Caprichos” , he also began his famous but always somewhat ambiguous affair with the Duchess of Alba, probably the most vivid figure that her society produced. In 1795 she visited … Continue reading →