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.
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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]…
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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…
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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,…
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Why politics are the enemy of art.
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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…
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[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…
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What is postmodernism, what are its shortcomings, and how has it negatively impacted the art world and contemporary culture? [repost with updates] Every student of art needs to grapple with Postmodernism at some point, either climb aboard, reject it, or integrate it. In order to come to terms with it, one needs to be able…
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Apparently I’m the first person to ask this question, or type it up and publish it online. At least a Google search turns up nothing. What everyone asks is, and I’m pretty sure you’ve heard it, “Can you like the art without liking the artist”? And by “without liking” they mean hating, or shunning, or…
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I watched a mini-documentary “Beauty: Explained” on Netflix, and a few pieces fell into place regarding how art is considered today. Before I connect the dots and introduce what the new science suggests, I will need to review what the dots are, and what they signify. If you already know your contemporary art history, you…
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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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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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[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 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 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 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…
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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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My last article was an attempt (I like to think a successful one) at disentangling the verbose “theory” of Roland Barthes that “The Author is Dead”. I shared my article in a couple Reddit forums, one being “philosophy” and the other “art theory”. There were a lot of responses, most the initial ones fairly reasonable,…
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Book Review: American Art Since 1945, by David Joseselit (which is a handy distillation of current art orthodoxy to deflate). This book could have been dictated by a blind person who had a peculiar obsession with rarefied conceptual art theory. The pleasure of looking at art is never considered. American Art Since 1945, by David…
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“The Painted Word hit the art world like a really bad, MSG-headache-producing, Chinese lunch.” – Rosalind Krauss. [If you know who Rosalind Krauss is, and her writing, you would know to consider the source, especially if you’d ever tried to plow through her attempts to harness and parrot the worse verbal excesses of the French…
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I was going to say, “Why the still image is still relevant” but that’s already a conceit: it’s merely not irrelevant. What I’m talking about might be most evident in photography, say, when you compare it to watching an artsy 70’s film with lingering shots that work as portraits, and it’s one beautiful image after…
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[Rant, which means I write this in one go, no editing. There’s a certain poetry to how sentences just unravel like a coiled rug. But mostly I don’t have time to write my more academic articles right now, and that’s because I’m much more subsumed in making my own art. Wait, I’d better do one…
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“Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” ~ Werner Heisenberg. I recently received an email in which someone addressed the sticky issue of me sometimes using the word spiritual (often in combination with psychedelic like this psychedelic/spiritual) in describing my art. Yes, I realize for most…
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What is Real in Art: With a Revaluation of Brian Ashbee’s Infamous “Art Bollocks” So much of the art of the recent past can be seen as attempts to get away from mere images, and confront the viewer with the real… ~ Brian Ashbee, 1999. The real in art is the evidence of self-awareness, or…
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Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
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