Opportunity: Food and Migration Competition

"Art Your Food" International call for artists. Deadline March 1, 2011 See full listing here.

Books to match your art?

We've all heard of collectors selecting and purchasing a work of art for its ability to match decor. Well, now, maybe that need not be the custom. Thanks to Thatcher Wine who creates custom book collections for clients. Fascinating, entrepreneurial, and cheeky. See the article here.

Does technology really work in museums?

After reading the article Museums 2.0: What Happens When Great Art Meets New Media? I have to wonder if technology will ever really work with museums. There is something to be said for actually going to a museum and experiencing the artwork for yourself. Now while I have never been to any super prestigious museum such as the MoMA or the Corcoran, I have been to view different shows when they have been at the Speed in Louisville and there is definitely a difference in just seeing a picture of a painting and seeing the painting for yourself.
This article gives several examples of how technology is already being used in museums such as audio tours and videos being played near the works of art and I personally do not see any problems with those forms of technology being used in the actual museums themselves. The problem comes when museums begin to have the tours online for people to see the artwork online and people do not feel the need to actually go to the museum any longer. One of the ongoing debates in my History of Modern Art class this semester was whether or not many of the students in the class liked Rothko's artwork with the student who really appreciated his artwork saying that you just had to experience it for yourself. I personally am not a fan of Rothko but maybe if I had gone to the Rothko's chapel and seen it for myself as opposed to just seeing pictures online I would feel differently. So many different sculptures and paintings can only be experienced in person because they are just too large to get a feel of through the computer screen.
It's sad when museums are being reduced to a Facebook layout of being able to comment on different paintings and clicking the "like" button along with millions of other people.

Opportunities: Design Competition

A campaign to develop a new symbol representing bioplastics. Read details here...

Art Devotion

The tag line, "What Medieval Art Has That Contemporary Art Badly Needs" led me to a great commentary in the Atlantic Monthly.  Written by Andrew Baker in response to a less than inspiring visit to the Whitney Biennial, "The Cloisters: A Good Place to Start" compares the experience of viewing works by anonymous artisans and the exquisitely painted The Merode Altarpiece triptych by Robert Campin to works by several more "famous" artists many of us know and love, including Mark Rothko.  In sum, Baker suggests that "...devotion—more than talent, craft, inspiration, or even time—is what separates them from us."  In other words, instead of seeking fame and fortune, medieval artists likely cared more about the artwork itself, and they were devoted to the act of making something worth remembering.  If you're looking for something to read, I recommend this provocative article about artists' motivations as well as similarities and differences concerning what the historical and current art worlds might value most. 

Opportunities: Position listing D.C.

Newseum Part-time Teacher, Washington, DC

Pop-Art

Pop-Art began in the 1950s in Britain and in the 1960s in America. Pop Art arose as a form of rebellion towards Abstract Expressionism which was seen as over intense and pretentious. Pop Art was meant for the ordinary man using ordinary objects that every person would recognize and love. People loved Pop Art because it could be mass produced but that was also an issue that art critics had because they did not believe it was truly art since it could be copied so readily.
The most well known artists are David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Hockney is one of the most famous Pop artists from Britain. He worked with paint, set design and photography. Hockney was most famous for his photocollages and paintings of swimming pools which he made during the time in which he lived in California. Johns is an American artist who is most well known for painting and printmaking. Johns is most well known for his painting of the Flag and most of his other paintings include images and objects from popular culture which is what characterizes him as a Pop artist. Johns mainly used maps, letters, numbers, flags, and targets as the objects of his paintings and prints. Lichtenstein was most well known for using old fashioned comic book strips as his subject matter. He is said to have defined Pop Art the best through his use of parody with the comic book strips as can be seen in Whaam!. Warhol is probably the most well known Pop Artist and seems to have summed up the entire idea of Pop Art in this quote: “What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.” This is the reason why Warhol used such iconic objects in his screenprinting, mainly using Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles. Warhol also did paintings of iconic characters such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Some of Warhol’s paintings had bright, neon colors with the colors not really resembling the actual image. This can be seen in Warhol’s depiction of Marilyn Monroe.

Emile Bernard

Emile Bernard was born on April 28, 1868 and died on April 16, 1941. He was a Post-Impressionist painter who was friends with Cezanne, Gauguin, Boch and Van Gogh. Bernard helped to start two art movements Synthetism and Cloisonnism. Synthetism was meant to synthesize three features of art being the artist’s feelings about their subject; the outward appearance of natural forms; and the purity of line, color and form. Cloisonnism was when an object was outlined and then colored in using one flat color. Bernard’s Breton Women and Children highlights this style. This can be seen by looking at figures and how the two women in the center have such heavy black outlining around them and are filled in with a very muted brown.
Bernard studied at College Sainte Barbe but was expelled for insubordinate behavior which included being expressive in his paintings. Once he was expelled from school Bernard went on a backpacking trip to Brittany and met Gauguin. After his trip to Brittany he went back home to move into his parents and saw his first exhibition with Seurat and Signac. A year later Bernard was invited to Seurat’s studio and Bernard was extremely interested in the Pointilism art movement, however Bernard and his friend Anquetin decided instead to start painting in the Cloisonnism style. During this time Bernard also met Van Gogh who arranged an exhibition with his own work along with Bernard, Anquetin and Koning.
“The first means that I use is to simplify nature to an extreme point. I reduce the lines only to the main contrasts and I reduce the colors to the seven fundamental colors of the prism. To see a style and not an item. To highlight the abstract sense and not the objective. And the second means were to appeal to the conception and to the memory by extracting yourself from any direct atmosphere. Appeal more to internal memory and conception. There I was expressing myself more, it was me that I was describing, although I was in front of the nature. There was an invisible meaning under the mute shape of exteriority.” This quote does a fantastic job of describing the ways in which Bernard worked within the Cloisonnism style. The point of this style was to outline certain objects in black so that they would stand out from the rest of the painting. Cloisonnism was very close to Symbolism in that the symbols in the paintings were meant to stand out, just within Cloisonnism the artists went about it in a different manner.

Recapping the Decade

With lines like: "I'd rather hang with adults who believe in the Tooth Fairy than kids who believe corporate branding design hack Shep Fairey is an artist", Mat Gleason is hysterical, brutal, and condense in his recapitulation of overrated artists of the decade. I am not suggesting that I agree with everything he writes, but reading his article did make me wonder, "is it time to reset the boundaries of artistic practice?"