Recently I’ve been slugging hard at why the Koons phenomena is all hype and no substance – the cotton candy of the art world – but then I discovered his paintings, which are much less known than his sculptures, and to my surprise in his newer ones he’s attempting to be more aesthetically complex, nuanced,…
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The fine art crowd had been fooled again. They’ve fallen for forgeries of Abstract Expressionist paintings by a Chinese artist; paid record amounts for one-striped paintings; crowned a businessman who can’t sculpt the greatest living artist when he merely makes reproductions of the most innocuous kitsch; and now they’ve bought a cheesy mall sculpture mistaking…
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Everything that glitters isn’t art. Sometimes it’s just a highly polished status symbol, in the form of a fashion bauble, for the ultra rich. Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog (Orange)” just sold for $58,405,000 at Christie’s, on November the 12th. If you are fabulously wealthy and missed out, fear not, there are four more copies in…
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This kitsch is so good it hurts. It helps that most people assume the girl brandishing the masterpiece is also the genius behind it. We might like it less if the creator were a disheveled man in his forties who knew what he was doing, and pissed himself laughing while making it. So, let’s just…
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Why Van Gogh’s work still has vitality, and Jeff Koons’ work was stillborn. Admittedly, Van Gogh’s work DOES suffer from posthumously being made into a whopping cliché. He’s been sentenced to the level of over-reproduction that guarantees most people will be sick of his work before they ever have a chance to understand it, the same way…
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Queen’s “News of the World” is easily one of my favorite all-time album covers. Just like realizing a favorite Zeppelin song is actually a cover of some guy-you-never-heard-of’s original material, finding this book cover came as a little reality tweaker. The original painting was from 1953, by Frank Kelly Freas. However, the new one is…
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One of the very best artists I’ve discovered through prowling around on the internet (in this case at Deviantart) is Andrew Newton, who did rather tight photo-realistic paintings in the past (the type that show every wrinkle, reflection, and wayward hair); but whose new work has broken out imaginatively into new terrain that faithfulness to…
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Today’s elite art buyers deluded into investing tens of millions on the Emperor’s new canvas. Blue painting with one white stripe fetches over 43 million at Sotheby’s auction. I’ve been to a Barnett Newman exhibition, stood in person before the canvases and patiently took in the subtle permutations of color and form, along with other…
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Some of the best abstract & non-representational art I’ve painstakingly scoured off of Deviantart and included in my group, the “Fine Art Asylum”. Let’s just get out of the way the difference between “abstract” and “non-representational,” which are usually used interchangeably, including by yours truly. “Abstract” is similar to “distorted”, as in an altered version…
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“A one liner that didn’t need to be made, but thank God it’s not as disgusting as his usual work.” Paul McCarthy’s eagerly awaited ginormous “Balloon Dog” will soon be open to public viewing. Paaaaah! Lucky art fans will be able to see it at the New York art fair this weekend at Randall Island.…
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I had a few famous teachers at UCLA, and I just happened upon this article in the New York Times that my sculpture teacher, Charles Ray (we knew him as Charlie Ray) is in the news because his sculpture of a boy with a frog is being taken down.
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Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
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