Everyone is an artist, and anything and everything is art (except painters and paintings)! Words have come to mean, if not their precise opposite, something quite different from what is or was in the dictionary. Literally now means figuratively (ex., “It was literally raining cats and dogs!”). Random means all sorts of things, like cool,…
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The popular notion that artists need to suffer is a threadbare excuse to underpay and exploit them. [Note: Van Gogh would have suffered a lot less if he’d sold more than one painting in his life.] The notion that artist need to suffer in order to gain inspiration or have something to say is really…
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Rather than go back and edit my prior post, I decided to write a follow-up to expand on the ideas a bit. I want to give another example of why skill is necessary, but also elaborate on why it’s considered just busy-work and not important in contemporary art. First, I want to give a more…
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I haven’t been writing or sharing anything lately because I’m in one of my training periods. This involves a lot of knuckling down and plowing through tutorials and exercises to fine tune my skills, and that requires a bit of a humble and honest mindset. It’s not fun compared to creating, but it’s essential to…
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After 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,…
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A 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…
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Philosopher, 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,…
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Killing in the name of… I’m going to write this in under an hour, because, I believe, if you can’t make an argument in that time, you don’t already know what the hell you are talking about. And if you can’t express it clearly, as I argued in my last post, you are not talking…
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I’ve come to the conclusion over time that if an author can’t make their ideas accessible to an intelligent general audience, they are most likely full of shit. I’m in the middle of writing an article about a certain legendary essay in art criticism. When I tackle these essays, the most difficult part is never…
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[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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I’m still digesting this. [You can read this brief intro, or skip the preamble and scroll down to the re-blogged article.] If you don’t know what an NPC is, it’s a “non-player character” in a computer game, and the term is used by the far right to ridicule people on the far left who they…
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The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
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The key word here, that might give someone reason to pause, is permanent. But, let me outline the argument, first. The underlying premise is that non-white men, and women of color in particular, are systematically being excluded from the permanent collections of art museums in America due to racism and sexism. In such a case,…
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[Usually I call these impromptu writings “runaway rants”, but that implies a certain combativeness or railing against something, which is sometimes true. “Reflections” is probably more fair, at least when I’m not objecting to something offensively stupid.] Sometimes something is so goddamned obvious we don’t see it, and I would not think this about myself…
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I’ve been blogging since about 2013 [which makes this one of the longest-lived, and, by the way, most comprehensive independent art and criticism blogs out there], but haven’t really analyzed my audience data until now. I’ve looked at my stats, but other than taking the results at face value — how many views, of what…
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If you don’t know already, Jeff Koons’s high-polished aluminum (or is it chrome?) “Rabbit” sold for over $90,000,000 at a Christie’s auction. One of the reasons I have nothing to say is that this sale says nothing about the art, and I’m not interested in money, nor qualified to talk about finance, economy, investment strategies,…
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The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
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The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
Read More
The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
Read MoreA few days ago MoMA uploaded a video of their “salon” on the topic of “White Male”. It could have been called “White Male: The Enemy” and the content would not have needed to change. I find this sort of thing in 2019 not to be the more enlightened, open-minded, generous, just, and progressive…
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I just wanted to get out one thought here, folks, which is percolating in my mind over my morning coffee. In general, morality is defined by others, and art makes its own definitions, hence they work at cross purposes. How much are we, as individuals, self-defined, and how much defined by everything outside of ourselves?…
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The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
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The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. … Excerpt…
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Painting is no longer a window on an imaginary world. or Painting is no longer allowed to be a window on an imaginary world. There are some ideas that are so ingrained, repeated so often, and are impressed on us so early, that we accept them before we even have the chance or ability to…
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This work by me appears in the video: The Case for Copying, by The Art Assignment / PBS Digital Studios, at @7:00. The purpose of the video is to defend the sometimes maligned contemporary art practice of appropriation, and when giving historical context it returns to Duchamp’s “Fountain”, and then quickly segues to my appropriation…
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When I say things that I like to think are to some degree hyperbolic, such as that the art world is a sea of toxic, relativistic, bullshit, this is the art world I’m talking about, and I fear my colorful exaggeration is a woefully inadequate understatement. This film is about the blue chip art world,…
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Just going to share this without comment, which doesn’t mean I’m endorsing it or taking any side for or against. I think I’m afraid to formulate an opinion. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve slipped into some parallel dimensions where, well, everything seems backwards or like a parody. I am perhaps softening up to the idea…
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Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
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