Vote in the poll. If you follow my blog you know I come down hard on these guys, especially Koons, and I’m in the midst of a 4-part post about the effect of the ultra rich on art and artists. These dudes are the darlings of the super rich art buyers, and the more I’ve…
Read MoreFrom birthday parties, to showers or a night out with friends, you can reserve our splatter room for a fun get-together. All can join in to make one large masterpiece or everyone makes their own piece of art, there is no age limit or skill required!! There are formulas, or templates one can use to…
Read MoreIf you prefer, you can watch the video version. Before we get started, I want you to look at just one of the 189 sculptures by Damien Hirst in his “Treasures From The Wreck of the Unbelievable”. This is a detail of just one of his Hydra and Kali sculptures. Looking at this image, what…
Read MoreJeff Koons is everything wrong with the art world. In his new series he places shiny, shiny blue balls on wee shelves (they’re kinda hard to see), affixed to larger than life copies, painted by his assistants, of famous paintings by old masters.
Read MoreKoons is in the news for being sued by people whose imagery he “appropriated” or “stole”, depending on how you look at it. This story is just repeating itself. The latest is that he based his “Fait d’Hiver” sculpture on an advertisement for a French clothes designer, and his “Naked” was inspired by a nude…
Read MoreWhat the critics aren’t saying. I’ve devoted probably far too much attention to Jeff Koons, rather than devoting my energy to championing the artists that I actually admire. And it is considered a terrible thing to criticize any art, especially conceptual art, because one ends up looking out of touch with the reality of NOW;…
Read MoreThis is where it’s going to get ugly. In part one I established that the ultra rich have taken control over the fine art world, and in part 2 I examined why the values of the middle class, and art that reflects those values, have been dashed to shit. Now for the upper cut. Are…
Read MoreTime to take off the kid gloves. If Hirst had produced his own work with his own hands, and if he hadn’t stolen the majority of his ideas from someone else, I’d think some of his work was pretty good. But you just can’t take credit for someone else’s ideas AND someone else’s realization. Hirst…
Read MoreArticle from Fine Art Alert*: Billed by some as Germany’s answer to Jeff Koons, Erich Küns (who spells his name with or without the h or umlaut) has been making conceptual pieces that challenge the supremacy and legitimacy of the reigning champions of the art world. His newest piece, a 50 foot androgynous, anatomical cut-away,…
Read MoreDamien Hirst has always been about death. Dead sharks, rotting cow’s heads, dissected bodies, desiccated insects… Some of his work is revolting, such as when it incorporates living maggots, but some, like the kaleidoscopic butterfly paintings (and particularly the stained-glass variant), are beautiful. He got away from death with his dot paintings, which one critic…
Read MoreJeff Koons’ new paintings represent a radical departure from his prior work, though recurring motifs such as foil balloon animals and mild erotica give a false impression of sameness and continuity. However, unlike any of his previous works, in the new body of paintings Koons hasn’t merely appropriated already existing objects or images in their…
Read MoreThere’s no AI, no appropriation, no references, no photo-bashing, no filters, no uploaded sculpts, no gimmick… It’s essentially just drawing from my imagination.
Read MoreThrough whatever alchemy, Margaret Keane turned her personal tragedy into painterly kitsch that managed to transcend itself.
Read MoreThis is a re-blog of one of my most popular posts, which I am doing largely because people have notified me that they have difficulty finding it on my blog, though somehow they’re become aware of it. My views haven’t changed substantially since I wrote this, not because I haven’t changed, but because my views…
Read MoreI take apart the institutional story of art which I was also indoctrinated into through graduate art school, and offer a more broad, human, complex, and even progressive alternative. This article will help you see through the BS that permeates much of contemporary art theory, and which is used to devalue imaginative visual art and to undermine the great art of the past.
Read MoreThis is an old post I am re-sharing from Feb, 2015, that fell through the cracks. I made 15 artists into cyclopes [and that is the corrected spelling of the plural of cyclops].
Read MoreThe cringe-worthy legacy of celebrity, cheese-filling art critic, Jerry Saltz. I marvel at the fact that for some reason, mysterious to me, people take Jerry Saltz, art critic of New York magazine, seriously. The best I can come up with is that among the most famous living art critics, his name is easier to spell…
Read MoreYou’re forgiven if you never heard of her. I never had either until an artist colleague emailed me an excerpt from her book, The Fraud of Contemporary Art. Almost everything by her and about her is in Spanish because she’s a Mexican art critic. Her biggest claim to fame is accidentally destroying a work of…
Read MoreArtists are among the least satisfied by what the blue-chip art world is churning out, and there’s a simple reason why. I’ve known for decades that thousands of dot paintings, for example, couldn’t hold an artist’s attention; and if you’d seen one, you’d seen them all. There’s the old notion of being an artist’s artist,…
Read MoreI am absolutely certain that you will never find in over 500 posts on this blog that I’ve ever referred to my art-making as a practice. I just make art. I don’t have a practice. Recently, a lot of people are referring to their art-making as a practice — even landscape painters — as if…
Read MoreI’m not accepted as a blue-chip artist, and there’s every indication I never will be. ~ Robert Williams. The best thing about Robert Willams is his paintings, but he’s also a likable fellow if you aren’t predisposed to dislike his type as much as the blue-chip art world turns its nose up at his art.…
Read More“I want to be a machine.” ~ Andy Warhol [Repost: updated with edits. The topic of free will has come up a lot lately, and my pro-free-will stance and my belief in anthropogenic global warming are the topics where I get the most devil’s advocates and friendly challenges. This article is one of my classics,…
Read MoreBroad Outlines This is intended as a useful device for a very general categorization of visual-based art. The idea is to simplify something that is already hopelessly convoluted. There are inevitably grotesque omissions, outstanding hybrids, uncategorizable outliers, and genres I don’t address (such as folk art, outsider art, and comics…). But it’s worth thinking about…
Read MoreLots of people hate conceptual art. It’s really quite remarkable, and possibly unfortunate. Ostensibly, artists make art to engage, entertain, and inform people, in which case hatred is an extreme response. Though it does occur to me that the kind of art that is most disliked might be the variety that tries to “challenge” the…
Read MoreAfter a century of anti-art bullying visual art, visual art bites back! There are 25 images in this mini-series so far. Above is the first, which I made four years ago, though I didn’t intend at the time to make even one more. Originally I attributed the faux painting to an imaginary artist, Günter Groos,…
Read MoreA hostile comment to me, on this blog, the other day, crystallized something. Rather, it was this specific idea in the diatribe against me, and defending a certain anti-artist (according to his interpretation) that stood out in particular: He is deflating the significance of the artist Deflating the significance of the artist is a good…
Read MorePhilosopher, and art-critic, Arthur Danto’s “The End of Art” is considered one of the most important and influential essays on art in the 20th century. The influence is undeniable, the importance determined by how important people take it to be, and the underlying arguments in relation to reality bonkers. Art ended before I was born,…
Read More[Quick rant over my morning cup(s) of coffee.] By changing art from an image to be seen, into a thing in a gallery or museum to be contemplated in that environment, art stopped being a universal medium and became a practice for the elite only. I live in the so-called “developing world” in Asia [and…
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Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
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