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 an old post I am re-sharing from Feb, 2015, that fell through the cracks. I made 15 artists into cyclopes [and that is the corrected spelling of the plural of cyclops].
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Art is the last hope of humans to not be eclipsed by AI, because it is a form of communication based on the predicament of our shared humanity, and requires consciousness, feeling, empathy, caring, and intent. But can digital super-intelligence fake it? It looks like it can.
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New AI poses an imminent existential threat to artists, especially if it has direct access to their art.
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I was only going to make 6, but I wanted to try an experiment, and so now we have 7. I have a couple more experiments I want to do, so I’ll probably push it to 9. And that’s a bit better for a series than 6. This one’s very bright, colorful, and outdoors. That’s…
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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…
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This image ends the series of 6. Here is the entire series. And here are a few details. I could say a lot more, but for tactical purposes, I’m just going to let the work stand on its own for now. I made this series for the NFT marketplace, and, well, it didn’t get any…
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This is one of my favorite works I’ve produced. It’s a tour de force of “painterly” digital painting [using techniques I developed]; addresses art history and the human condition; is an homage to Francis Bacon; and continues the tradition of modernist figurative painting into the digital era.There’s also quite a story behind this, which you…
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If you haven’t see the first three, here’s a gallery with all four: If you read my last post, you have a good idea what this series is about. I got some really good comments on it, too, here and on Patreon. I was heartened to discover that people got it on their own, and…
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The third image in this series of digital portrait paintings for the digital age.
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This is the second in this series of portraits for 2022, and directed toward the digital art NFT community. No, it is not a self-portrait. The faces I’ve used so far are ones I generated using AI. Usually people manipulate the algorithms to create unrealistically beautiful, unbelievable, and fashionable people, but I wanted to explore…
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NO, THAT IS NOT A SELF PORTRAIT, OR BASED ON ONE! I haven’t been nearly as active here, because I’ve been wrangling with the NFT sphere, which is the best place for digital artists to make money. The halcyon days of unknown digital artists getting rich selling NFTs may be over. Inevitably, the market would…
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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…
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It’s a very bad idea to try to steal my art and sell it as your own, and for a few devastating reasons. I only share comparatively low resolution images of my work online, which means you have a third-rate version, and I have a hi-rez original to prove authorship. There is always going to…
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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.
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Dirk Bouts’ painting “Fall of the Damned” is a masterful conjuring of hell. Post contains extreme details.
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New trailer for my feature length Salvator Mundi documentary
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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…
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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…
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My version of the Salvator Mundi makes the shortcomings of the supposedly authentic da Vinci painfully evident, and in plain sight.
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My digital restoration of the Salvator Mundi makes a visual argument as to why the physical restoration is not representative of Leonardo’s hand.
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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!
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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.
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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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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…
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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…
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If you were wondering what a digital artist like me thinks of Beeple, and his $69 million sale at Christies of a JPEG he most likely used an algorithm to produce in a matter of seconds, this video should make that apparent. Meanwhile an all-time least favorite, Damien Hirst has announced plans to overtake Beeple…
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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.
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Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
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