What is outsider art? “It is eccentric, engaging, and often apocalyptic. It stands outside the standard schools and movements, and is produced by artists who are usually self-taught and often judged insane. It includes some of the most compelling, disturbing, and/or simply strange painting, sculpture, and even literature and music being produced today. Whatever outsider art might be, Joe Coleman is one of its biggest stars, with vivid paintings of riots, demons, serial killers, and sideshow geeks, all rendered in an instantly recognizable style. Yet New York’s annual Outsider Art Fair, has decided not to include him when it reopens its doors next month.” The problem? Coleman has been to art school, “thus removing him from the ranks of the self-taught.”
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Guggenheim To Close In Las Vegas
The Guggenheim budget is roughly half what it was at the end of the 1990s. So the museum has been cutting back programs and staff. And, as long rumored, the Goog is closing its Rem Koolhaas-designed Las Vegas branch while it looks for more money…
Christo In New York Close to Approval
It looks like the Christo and Jeanne Claude project to cover New York’s Central Parki with banners might go ahead, after years of trying. “Charlatans? Shamans? With their hard-sell tactics, their followers trailing them like Deadheads from one gig to the next, their feel-good populism and phenomenally expensive, grandiose ambitions, it’s no wonder Christo and Jeanne-Claude have made skeptics of people who haven’t seen their work, don’t understand it or don’t want to, and who won’t take them seriously.” And yet…
Access To Art – Requiring A Commitment To Buy…
The artist you like doesn’t produce much work. And people are clamoring for it. So how do you get a piece of the action? “A gallery’s waiting list is no first-come, first-served, restaurant-type arrangement. Getting on the list requires collectors to demonstrate a ‘commitment’ to the dealer’s gallery in the form of consistent, long-term buying.” That takes a certain amount of work…
Will Tate Use Profit to Save Painting?
Last week the Tate was mounting a campaign to raise money to prevent the sale and eexport of Joshua Reynolds’ “Portrait of Omai”. Then the museum came into a £14.6 million profit in a deal that recovered two Turners stolen from the museum in 1994. So will Tate use the money to rescue the Reynolds? Er…
Why Philosophy Has Lost Its Grip On The World
There was a time philosophy was thought a lofty pursuit – a calling that tried to explain the world. But “despite important developments in recent decades in philosophical accounts of thought and meaning, law and ethics, and knowledge and consciousness, the enterprise of philosophy is no longer taken very seriously nor accorded any special status in the broader culture.” Why? “Too often these days we reduce philosophy to confession and intimacy to kitsch precisely because we live without a sense of the democratic res publica.
America’s Major Culture Groups To Meet For First Time
For the first time, America’s major arts service organizations will gather together. The American Symphony Orchestra League, Opera America, Dance USA, Theatre Communications Group, Chamber Music America, Chorus America, Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Meet the Composer, American Music Center, American Composers Forum and Music Critics Association of North America will hold conferences in June 2004 in Pittsburgh.
Non-Artists Control Aussie Arts
Just who is running Australian arts organizations? Not artists. “Just under 12 per cent of the directors on the 40 boards are practising artists, former artists, or teachers in the arts. The 40 boards comprised 356 directors, of whom 42 are artists, artistic directors or teachers of an art form. The nation’s arts boards are dominated by marketing executives, investment bankers, professional company directors, media personalities and accountants.”
Controversy Over Movie’s Pre-Monster Hitler
“The world knows that Adolf Hitler was the great monster of the 20th century, and the story of his rise and fall can now be efficiently packed into books and documentaries of almost any length. The great imaginative leap made in the new movie ‘Max,’ opening on Friday in New York and Los Angeles, is to give us a picture of Hitler that comes not from the last, well-thumbed third of his life, but from an earlier moment, just after the First World War, when a 30-year-old Hitler was an altogether marginal person whose future was totally up for grabs. Sight unseen, ‘Max’ has been condemned by the Jewish Defense League and others.”
A New Way To Pay For School
So school is too expensive for most students to pay for without help. And student loans are becoming more difficult to get and harder to afford. So MP3.com founder Michael Robertson came up with a new idea to loan students money. Instead of paying set interest rates, students approved by Robertson’s program agree to “pay less than 1 percent of her future income for 15 years after graduation to cover the new loan.”