“An artist, teacher, and experimentally minded gallery owner who continued to make art after suffering a traumatic brain injury in 2010, … Bloodgood made abstract pieces that fracture and layer space with an offhand sophistication. They allude to Clyfford Still’s craggy patches of color, Brice Marden’s idiosyncratic lines, and Hans Hofmann and Joan Mitchell’s sparer and scrappier canvases.”
Tag: 05.08.18
What On Earth *Is* This Giant Contraption? It’s A 210-Instrument Playable Sculpture
“Timpani is played by a rolling pin with spikes. A trombone slide is equipped with a mallet that hits a xylophone. A horn has a Hindustani tabla drum stuffed in its bell; it’s both blown and tapped. Rather than having a bow play a cello, the cello – strapped to a rocking chair, swaying back and forth – plays the bow. The piece is Mauricio Kagel’s Zwei Mann Orchester (‘Two-Man Band’), heard last week in the first of a series of ‘Sound Machines’ performances … The opening-night audience was slack-jawed.”
Why The Dancing In Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’ Is So Uncomfortable To Watch
It’s not just that Donald Glover keeps dancing as violence spreads all around him, writes Aida Amoako. It’s our own kinesthetic empathy – the action of mirror neurons in the brain that makes us want to move along as we see someone else dance. “An internal struggle begins in the viewer’s body, which is pulled between joy and horror. Just as the video questions how we can dance when there is pandemonium all around, the audience struggles with whether to continue moving, too, after witnessing such brutality.”
The Problem With Saying A Work Of Art Is ‘Necessary’
“The prospect of ‘necessary’ art allows members of the audience to free themselves from having to make choices while offering the critic a nifty shorthand to convey the significance of her task, which may itself be one day condemned as dispensable. The effect is something like an absurd and endless syllabus, constantly updating to remind you of ways you might flunk as a moral being. It’s a slightly subtler version of the 2016 marketing tagline for the first late-night satirical news show with a female host, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee: ‘Watch or you’re sexist.'”
How The Rockefellers Helped Shape The Modern Art Market
The Rockefellers entered the Modern art market in its earliest days, and the manner in which they collected reflects, perhaps influenced, its dramatic growth through the 20th century.
An Intellectual “Dark Web”?
It is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.
David Frum: The Politics Of Cultural Appropriation Are Complicated
To the extent that the cultural-appropriation police are urging their targets to respect others who are different, they are saying something that everyone needs to hear. But beyond that, they can plunge into doomed tangles. American popular culture is a mishmash of influences: British Isles, Eastern European, West African, and who knows what else. Cole Porter committed no wrong by borrowing from Jewish music; Elvis Presley enriched the world when he fused country-and-western with rhythm-and-blues.
How Once-Golden Univision Has Imploded
Once upon a time, Univision, an American broadcasting operation aimed primarily at Spanish speakers in the United States, was a tremendous golden goose laying tremendous golden eggs: It made incredible amounts of money and had to do essentially nothing for it other than run programming produced by Televisa, a Mexican broadcasting operation. The fairy tale ended long ago. Univision has been in decline for years, thanks to a disastrous private equity buyout finalized in 2007; an aging audience; a burdensome program-licensing deal with Televisa; competition from Telemundo and Netflix; layers of overpaid and useless middle management; and a general failure to position itself for a digital future.
Ian McEwan Is Pessimistic About Today’s Literary Landscape
“Literary fiction is in a curious nosedive saleswise, down about 35 per cent over the past five years. Everyone’s got a theory: TV box sets, some sort of fatigue, who knows. Maybe it’s not just good enough.”
Has Protest Art In The Trump Era Let Us Down?
While the self-proclaimed Resistance debuted with vibrant-pink mass action, the most-distinctive cultural creations that have accompanied it so far—at least in the rapid-response popular mediums of music and TV—haven’t been so fired up. Nor have they been, to use the clichéd dismissals that plenty of political art readily invites, shrill or didactic. Instead, the general drift has been in the spirit of Jeff Rosenstock’s album: self-questioning, tentative, conciliatory, emotional. It is, for better or worse, the art not of a revolution but of a failed revolution.