My latest video. This one’s more straight-up art history, but with some significant observations and analysis that are all my own and you won’t find anywhere else.
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My latest video. This one’s more straight-up art history, but with some significant observations and analysis that are all my own and you won’t find anywhere else.
Read More“The Last of England” by Ford Madox Brown is not only a super-crisp, vivid image that perfectly captures the sensations of being in a small boat tossed about at sea. It is a tragic self-portrait of the artist, his wife, and their baby, leaving England never to return, hoping to find better prospects in some distant land.
Read MoreAI may sour people to art that has anything to do machine learning or processes, and cause a renewed appreciation of physical art.
Read MoreMy 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 MoreThis 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 MoreThrough whatever alchemy, Margaret Keane turned her personal tragedy into painterly kitsch that managed to transcend itself.
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 MoreThe 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 MoreA hi-rez, in-depth dive into one of the most gruesome and virtuoso paintings of hell by an old master painter. BEWARE: Extreme Details! Halloween 2021 appropriate. Dirk Bouts painted “The Fall of the Damned” in 1470, 20 years before Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”. This is a spectacular, underrated, and obscure painting that deserves to be appreciated as a masterpiece of the late Middle Ages and the Northern Renaissance, and of all time. I discovered this painting on my own, and took it upon myself to share it with you. There is no other YouTube video about this painting, and no other video period. I trust my own eyes.
The video also explores paintings of Hell by Hieronymus Bosch, Hans Memling, and Rogier van der Weyden.
Read MoreDirk Bouts’ painting “Fall of the Damned” is a masterful conjuring of hell. Post contains extreme details.
Read MoreThis 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 MoreOver 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 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 MoreIt’s finally here, after months of work. It’s coming in at 2 hours and 24 minutes, which I would not have even thought was possible in the beginning. You’d think that means I just ramble on endlessly, but it’s highly scripted for most of it, and tightly edited. It follows a very logical progression, covering…
Read MoreFollowers of my blog may wonder what the hell happened to me. Well, I’ve been working hard on this feature-length art documentary, including, among many other things, my own recreation of the Salvator Mundi. I decided to share with you some custom graphics I made on the fly. Anyone who grew up watching Star Trek…
Read MoreMy version of the Salvator Mundi makes the shortcomings of the supposedly authentic da Vinci painfully evident, and in plain sight.
Read MoreMy digital restoration of the Salvator Mundi makes a visual argument as to why the physical restoration is not representative of Leonardo’s hand.
Read MoreA 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 MoreThe 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 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 MoreIf 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 MoreIs 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 MoreIs the Salvator Mundi really a painting by Leonardo da Vinci? Why are Christ’s eyes so wonky? Who broke the nose of Jesus? And why are there so many amateur mistakes? The painting doesn’t appear good enough to be by the great artist, but there’s a surprise revelation.
Read MoreAfter jettisoning the news for 3 weeks, I’ve started a YouTube channel and produced 1.5 videos.
Read MoreMy fledgling video about art for my YouTube channel.
Read MoreMy new YouTube channel has arrived!
Read MoreGoya’s infamous nude “Maja” has some problems.
Read MoreWaldemar (gotta’ love that name] has been growing on me. I mean, I disagree with him quite a lot, not only in his assessments of art and artists, but just in terms of how he describes what we are looking at. He might declare a painting morose that I find quite chipper. But after initially…
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