My new video argues against the demand that artists work in a single signature style for most or all of their careers. Jam-packed with hi-rez art, including 25 of my pieces in 25 styles.
Read More
Insisting Artists Work In One Style Limits Their Creativity
This pressure to stick to one avenue of expression, and the exclusion of stylistic innovation, serves to choke artists’ creativity, and contextualizes them as craftspersons making pretty baubles for the marketplace.
Read More
Big Eyes: The Film, The Artist, The Legacy
Through whatever alchemy, Margaret Keane turned her personal tragedy into painterly kitsch that managed to transcend itself.
Read More
Why People Hate Contemporary/Conceptual Art
This 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 More
Dismantling the Dominant Art Narrative
I 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 More
Runaway Rant: F AI Art!
A hyperbolic rant against AI art.
Read More
Better Call Saltz (or not)
The 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 More
Runaway Rant: Sorry, but it’s not art.
The crumpled paper above is not art, even if it was put on a pedestal, and under glass, and exhibited in a museum. And that’s OK. You can handle it. In the case of Martin Creed’s crumpled paper, it’s not art, it’s bullshit. However, there can be all manner of endeavors that are skilled, intelligent,…
Read More
Texture Versus Information in the Visual Arts
This is an important distinction, and the art world has placed so much more value on information than texture over the last century that texture has been banished to the periphery when discussing art. I recently watched a video about Kara Walker’s monument, Fons Americanus, and while the narrator analyzed how it quotes and challenges…
Read More
‘The Fall of the Damned’, by Dirk Bouts (1470): a Masterful Conjuring of Hell
Dirk Bouts’ painting “Fall of the Damned” is a masterful conjuring of hell. Post contains extreme details.
Read More
New Video: All Art is Political! NOT
This is the second video in my Abominable Ideas in Art series, and based on a group of articles I wrote a few years ago. Here I tackled the ubiquitous and self-righteous notion that all art is political. People assume this is a progressive idea, but because it places art (all art and art history]…
Read More
New Video: Making Money is Art?!
Over the last week or so YouTube’s algorithm, or perhaps whomever manipulates it, eased off the stranglehold on my videos. New comments and subscribers started to trickle in after weeks of silence. And so, I thought, perhaps it wasn’t a waste of time after all. I also noticed that people have watched over 3,000 hours…
Read More
“The Fraud of Contemporary Art”: Dangerous Art Criticism by Avelina Lesper
You’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 More
I made a trailer/Preview
New trailer for my feature length Salvator Mundi documentary
Read More
Radical New Derivative Redundancy
A picture can be worth a thousand words, and save me the time of typing them up. The first image is from Wikiart’s section on Francois Morellet, below. And the second image is from Damien Hirst’s own site: Borrowing ideas wholesale is radical!
Read More
Why Art Theory and the Dominant Narrative are Wrong
The truth, I like to say, is moderately simple, but lies must be elaborate. If you don’t agree with the conclusions of obtuse art theory, than, frankly, you are presumed intellectually and possibly morally inferior. Insults will flock towards you like mosquitoes when your evening walk meanders too close to the swamp. Obviously you know…
Read More
My new video explains why so much contemporary art sucks
The video focuses on the fact that the big name art stars make art, not for their artists peers, or even for themselves, but rather for the billionaire buyers who they think are suckers waiting to be fleeced. This art, further, is coming out of the Duchampian, anti-art, appropriationist tradition, which incidentally allows artists to churn out bigger and slicker products, faster, and get them into the marketplace for the purposes of speculation and moving money. Quite naturally, art made to sell fast to suckers with millions in disposable income doesn’t appeal to artists and connoisseurs who love art for its inherent qualities.
Read More
Why big name artists don’t make art for other artists, or themselves
Artists 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 More
My Digitally Cleaned Salvator Mundi
If you watched my last video, you know what this is all about. I’ve been very critical of the status of the Salvator Mundi as an authentic da Vinci, mostly because of egregious amateur errors the master would never make. However, many of these errors and the overall fluffy, cream-puff aura the current incarnation of…
Read More
New Video: Resurrecting Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi from Over Restoration
Is the Salvator Mundi really by Leonardo da Vinci? Did the restoration botch it horribly? I argue the latter is absolutely true, and the former probable. I graphically show where the restoration took some liberties that clearly illustrate a divergence from the original painting, in which case the end result is anything but a da…
Read More
Debute Video on My YouTube Art Channel
My fledgling video about art for my YouTube channel.
Read More
Cruel Abominations of the Old Masters Exposed: Goya’s “Maja”
Goya’s infamous nude “Maja” has some problems.
Read More
Runaway Rant: Art succeeds inspite of politics, not because of it
Why politics are the enemy of art.
Read More
Runaway Rant: My Art is not a “Practice”
I 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 More
Hyper-moralization & the art world
We live in a time of extraordinary moralizing. You may have noticed a no-holds-barred competition to see who is the most morally pure, and who isn’t, either by birthright or by belief. There’s always some of that going on. When I was growing up it issued from the religious right. Nancy Reagan famously advised to…
Read More
No Country for White Artists?
Museum Curator forced to resign
over “toxic white supremacist beliefs”!
WIP: B&W Sneak Preview
Almost finished. It finally occurred to me to look at the image in B&W to see how my lighting and modeling is without the distraction of color. Not bad. It looks more like a digital sculpture than a drawing, which is what it is. I’ve still got some detailing to do, and other modifications. Should…
Read More
The “Spiritual” in Art for the Intellectually Rigorous
[This is a re-post of an article from two-years ago which I’d forgotten I’d written, but rediscovered while looking for one of the images in it. I defend the notion of the spiritual in art in a hardball, rational and reasoned, fashion with no reliance on superstition, religion, or any variety of feel-good, wish-washy, wishful…
Read More
Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
Recent Comments