The reason I made this video is that I discovered that the infamous clip of art critic Robert Hughes saying that Andy Warhol was “stupid” could no longer be found on YouTube.
Read More
Van Gogh’s Ear | The Hidden Truth
These days, the art marketplace writes art history, and what is best for the profit margin of the top buyers and sellers is not necessarily faithful to what is true, best for art, or conducive to understanding art, artists, reality, or each other. Au contraire, and in spades. The legend of Vincent’s extreme psychological distress—the…
Read More
New Video: How Art History Got Pollock Wrong
This one’s a beauty. The video is more about the destructive impact art history has had on art than it is about Pollock, but even Pollock haters should appreciate the aesthetics of his work as I’ve showcased it.
Read More
No, The Salvator Mundi Is Not a Split Androgynous Image.
UPDATE: I just made a video version of this post if you’d prefer to kick back and watch rather than read. For some mysterious reason, my video about the Salvator Mundi not being a real Leonardo, basically because it sucks, has suddenly been getting a lot of traction after being buried by the algorithm for…
Read More
Video Release: A New Look at The Last of England
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
A Tragic Self-Portrait at Sea: The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown
“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 More
The Future of Visual Art May Be Physical, and Other Art Blogger’s Recent Physical Art
AI may sour people to art that has anything to do with machine learning or processes, and cause a renewed appreciation of physical art.
Read More
New Video: Insisting Artists Work In One Style Limits Their Creativity
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
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
New Video: ‘The Fall of the Damned”, by Dirk Bouts (1470): a Masterful Conjuring of Hell
A 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 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
New Video: What Did The Salvator Mundi Really Look Like?
It’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 More
Star Trek Mundi
Followers 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 More
Banned for life for making this version of the Salvator Mundi
My version of the Salvator Mundi makes the shortcomings of the supposedly authentic da Vinci painfully evident, and in plain sight.
Read More
What did the Salvator Mundi really look like?
My digital restoration of the Salvator Mundi makes a visual argument as to why the physical restoration is not representative of Leonardo’s hand.
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
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
New Video: Salvator Mundi FACEPLANT
Is 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 More
No News for Over 3 Weeks: I’m Cured
After jettisoning the news for 3 weeks, I’ve started a YouTube channel and produced 1.5 videos.
Read More
Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
Recent Comments