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…
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Since the discovery in 2016 of a doodle made by Dr. Felix Rey ostensibly illustrating what portion of Van Gogh’s ear was removed, virtually every art critic, historian, and institution, including the Van Gogh Museum, now maintains that Vincent sliced off the entirety of his ear. If, like me, you “didn’t get the memo,” you…
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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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On this day in 1888, which is 130 years ago, Vincent Van Gogh cut of a piece of his right ear in a bout of anguish brought on by his fight with Paul Gauguin, who was leaving Arles and their shared yellow house. Earlier in the evening Gauguin had threatened Vincent with a saber, and…
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Hope you don’t mind if we just cut through all of the avalanche of bullshit, right to the proverbial bone. This is something I figured out when I was 18, but somehow there seems to be a cloud of confusion around the topic. To best address this, I’m going to go with an analogy. Let’s…
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At Eternity’s Gate is to the painter, Vincent Van Gogh, what the paintings in the movie are to his own: an atrocity. I’ve been excited to see this movie for a long time, mostly because it stars Willem Dafoe as Van Gogh. The only actor who might have been more fun to cast in the…
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This photo makes me angry. I haven’t seen or suspected anything could be this delusional in the art world since Jeff Koons claimed he improved upon old-master paintings by affixing a gaudy, blue gazing ball to assistant-painted copies of them. It’s not just that Schnabel had the arrogance to curate his own work next to…
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This poignant new documentary [which you can watch here] brings together two of my favorite things: Van Gogh and China. When I say China I’m talking about the everyday China that I lived in for over 4 years, and the good, hard-working people who live there: not the economic superpower or the communist government. Here…
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Some of my favorite pieces by famous artists are unknown. These works have become, for me, like vivid dreams forgotten within seconds of awakening, or photo albums destroyed in a fire. Most are lost treasures which only now exist as JPEGS that people such as myself happen to have downloaded. Not only are these works…
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The purpose of science is to explore the universe, make discoveries, and bring back evidence: and the purpose of visual art is to explore the visual imagination, make discoveries, and bring back evidence (visual evidence). Maybe a more goofy analogy would be more direct and memorable: You are the Captain of the Art-ship Enterprise, and…
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Why Van Gogh’s work still has vitality, and Jeff Koons’ work was stillborn. Admittedly, Van Gogh’s work DOES suffer from posthumously being made into a whopping cliché. He’s been sentenced to the level of over-reproduction that guarantees most people will be sick of his work before they ever have a chance to understand it, the same way…
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I just completed this image to my satisfaction. Like so many of my pieces, it started as an experiment. The idea was to make a non-representational image with all the qualities of being representational: foreground, background, modelling, and shading. There are figures, recesses, protuberances, open space, geographic and architectural elements. All the building-blocks of reality,…
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Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
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