#artcriticism — Public Fediverse posts

Vicky Osterweil on Disney, Intellectual Property and Storytelling

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2026/05/03/vicky-osterweil-on-disney-intellectual-property-and-storytelling/

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious”*…

Eminent art critic and historian Hal Foster has started what will be a four-part series in The Paris Review on looking at– and seeing– art…

Many of us look at art in the company of others; I have done so with a close friend, off and on, for five decades. We meet at a museum, wander around, settle on a painting (or, rather, it settles on us), look, talk, look more, talk more. We attend to the work and to each other; we enter its world together. Only recently and rarely have we written up our reactions, which we do individually. A testament to our friendship, this writing is also a tribute to the art, to the discursivity that informs it and the sociability that it allows. 

Paintings call out to us in myriad ways. My friend and I are most drawn to pictures that are reflexive about looking, that anticipate it, that sharpen it, that alter our habits of seeing. This may be a Modernist criterion, but it hardly disqualifies older art; we have ranged as far back as Early Netherlandish painting. In this selection, though, I focus on pictures that date from the past hundred and fifty years. (For better or worse, that’s also my academic field.)  

My aim in this exercise isn’t to tease out context, which is almost too present in wall texts today. Immediacy may be a mirage, but I try to come to my chosen works as directly as possible. It’s not that I ignore the texts on the walls; I just don’t get stuck there. I don’t pretend to see with a “period eye,” as Michael Baxandall called the attempt to perceive as historical viewers may have. Contextual information may often be necessary, but I keep it at a useful minimum. And though I sometimes get speculative, that’s part of the fun. In fact, one purpose of these studies is to be loosened from my scholarly superego (which isn’t very strong, in any case). I want to demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it. Ignorant Art History is a big tent.

Looking at a painting is a welcome respite from scanning a screen. In that sense, this exercise is reactive: I labor in the small cottage industry of attention that has sprouted up in the cracks of the massive complex of distraction all around us. A phenomenological turn often occurs at times of intensive mediation, but the point is not simply to have our perceptions mirrored back to us. T. J. Clark has put the aim nicely: “When I am in front of a picture the thing I most want is to enter the picture’s world: it is the possibility of doing so that makes pictures worth looking at for me.” To look at a painting is also to exit our world for a while, and then to return to it cast in a different—distant—light. The time travel is often wonderful, and almost free… 

– “The Ignorant Art Historian: An Introduction“

The first of his short essays, on the Matisse pictured above, just dropped…

… As we approach this painting, we have little idea of what it depicts, or whether it depicts anything at all. A washy blue covers the entire surface unevenly, and its space is traversed by several black vectors. A vertical line stretches the length of the canvas on the far right, where it intersects with two horizontal lines that cut across the center of the picture. In the lower half of the painting, three diagonal lines run roughly parallel to one another, also toward the right.

The main motif floats in the top third of the painting. Outlined heavily in black, its interior is made up of the same blue as elsewhere except for one white blotch and a few black planes, scratched to reveal the white underneath. Three thin, white planes also appear in the interior, each crossed with a horizontal black stripe; the central plane divides the space in two. 

All this is hard to sort out, and two more pieces on the right—a green blob beside a black one—only add to the puzzle. It is a complicated painting, but its complication is borne of simplicity. Completed in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, it is an austere work in an austere time. 

The title offers a kind of lifeline: View of Notre Dame. But what kind of view and from where? And what are all the black lines? Neither abstract nor representational, the painting requires a shift in our way of looking: its elements are less images of things than signs for them. 

We know that the Notre-Dame sits on the western end of the Île de la Cité in Paris. So the three diagonals might signify the quai along the Left Bank, the low path alongside the Seine, and the great river. The two horizontal lines then read as a bridge over the Seine, and the slight curve underneath them as its arched support. Finally, the long vertical line serves as the near edge of the quai, or perhaps of the very building from which the view is taken. The angles suggest that we look down on the scene from a Left Bank apartment several floors up. The overall blue signifies air and water where that seems appropriate, and anything else (or nothing at all) where it does not. 

How does the squarish motif convey the famous cathedral? If the bisected shape suggests the two great towers, the white plane between them might evoke the rose window. Since we view the cathedral from the Left Bank, it appears turned away from us slightly, its south side more exposed. If the black areas register the sides of the building in deep shadow, the white ones might signify the play of light across the facade. And the blobs in green and black? The green could be a plant, and the black its shadow. 

The pieces don’t add up completely or neatly. But then signification is about signaling-just-enough rather than representing-in-full. Here, seeing is guesswork. It often is elsewhere, too; we just don’t acknowledge it. Sometimes a sign doesn’t signify and sometimes it suggests more than one thing. The diagonals evoke both the quai and the river; the black areas convey a material thing here and an immaterial shadow there. 

Around this time, Matisse kept a studio above the quai Saint-Michel. Might View of Notre Dame double as a view of the interior from which it was painted? In that case, the Paris cathedral is also a French window, with blue sky and white clouds seen in or through the glass; the green shrub is also a plant on the sill; the lines of the bridge are also the molding in the room; and—who knows?—the diagonals of the bank are also the easel on which this very painting was produced… 

– “The Ignorant Art Historian: View of Notre Dame“

The remaining three installments will drop weekly into May.

* “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” – Albert Einstein

###

As we appreciate art, we might recall that on this date in 1808, at the outbreak of the Peninsular War, the people of Madrid rose up in rebellion against French occupation. 

In 1814, Francisco de Goya memorialized the event in his painting The Second of May 1808.

source

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious”*…

Eminent art critic and historian Hal Foster has started what will be a four-part series in The Paris Review on looking at– and seeing– art…

Many of us look at art in the company of others; I have done so with a close friend, off and on, for five decades. We meet at a museum, wander around, settle on a painting (or, rather, it settles on us), look, talk, look more, talk more. We attend to the work and to each other; we enter its world together. Only recently and rarely have we written up our reactions, which we do individually. A testament to our friendship, this writing is also a tribute to the art, to the discursivity that informs it and the sociability that it allows. 

Paintings call out to us in myriad ways. My friend and I are most drawn to pictures that are reflexive about looking, that anticipate it, that sharpen it, that alter our habits of seeing. This may be a Modernist criterion, but it hardly disqualifies older art; we have ranged as far back as Early Netherlandish painting. In this selection, though, I focus on pictures that date from the past hundred and fifty years. (For better or worse, that’s also my academic field.)  

My aim in this exercise isn’t to tease out context, which is almost too present in wall texts today. Immediacy may be a mirage, but I try to come to my chosen works as directly as possible. It’s not that I ignore the texts on the walls; I just don’t get stuck there. I don’t pretend to see with a “period eye,” as Michael Baxandall called the attempt to perceive as historical viewers may have. Contextual information may often be necessary, but I keep it at a useful minimum. And though I sometimes get speculative, that’s part of the fun. In fact, one purpose of these studies is to be loosened from my scholarly superego (which isn’t very strong, in any case). I want to demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it. Ignorant Art History is a big tent.

Looking at a painting is a welcome respite from scanning a screen. In that sense, this exercise is reactive: I labor in the small cottage industry of attention that has sprouted up in the cracks of the massive complex of distraction all around us. A phenomenological turn often occurs at times of intensive mediation, but the point is not simply to have our perceptions mirrored back to us. T. J. Clark has put the aim nicely: “When I am in front of a picture the thing I most want is to enter the picture’s world: it is the possibility of doing so that makes pictures worth looking at for me.” To look at a painting is also to exit our world for a while, and then to return to it cast in a different—distant—light. The time travel is often wonderful, and almost free… 

– “The Ignorant Art Historian: An Introduction“

The first of his short essays, on the Matisse pictured above, just dropped…

… As we approach this painting, we have little idea of what it depicts, or whether it depicts anything at all. A washy blue covers the entire surface unevenly, and its space is traversed by several black vectors. A vertical line stretches the length of the canvas on the far right, where it intersects with two horizontal lines that cut across the center of the picture. In the lower half of the painting, three diagonal lines run roughly parallel to one another, also toward the right.

The main motif floats in the top third of the painting. Outlined heavily in black, its interior is made up of the same blue as elsewhere except for one white blotch and a few black planes, scratched to reveal the white underneath. Three thin, white planes also appear in the interior, each crossed with a horizontal black stripe; the central plane divides the space in two. 

All this is hard to sort out, and two more pieces on the right—a green blob beside a black one—only add to the puzzle. It is a complicated painting, but its complication is borne of simplicity. Completed in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, it is an austere work in an austere time. 

The title offers a kind of lifeline: View of Notre Dame. But what kind of view and from where? And what are all the black lines? Neither abstract nor representational, the painting requires a shift in our way of looking: its elements are less images of things than signs for them. 

We know that the Notre-Dame sits on the western end of the Île de la Cité in Paris. So the three diagonals might signify the quai along the Left Bank, the low path alongside the Seine, and the great river. The two horizontal lines then read as a bridge over the Seine, and the slight curve underneath them as its arched support. Finally, the long vertical line serves as the near edge of the quai, or perhaps of the very building from which the view is taken. The angles suggest that we look down on the scene from a Left Bank apartment several floors up. The overall blue signifies air and water where that seems appropriate, and anything else (or nothing at all) where it does not. 

How does the squarish motif convey the famous cathedral? If the bisected shape suggests the two great towers, the white plane between them might evoke the rose window. Since we view the cathedral from the Left Bank, it appears turned away from us slightly, its south side more exposed. If the black areas register the sides of the building in deep shadow, the white ones might signify the play of light across the facade. And the blobs in green and black? The green could be a plant, and the black its shadow. 

The pieces don’t add up completely or neatly. But then signification is about signaling-just-enough rather than representing-in-full. Here, seeing is guesswork. It often is elsewhere, too; we just don’t acknowledge it. Sometimes a sign doesn’t signify and sometimes it suggests more than one thing. The diagonals evoke both the quai and the river; the black areas convey a material thing here and an immaterial shadow there. 

Around this time, Matisse kept a studio above the quai Saint-Michel. Might View of Notre Dame double as a view of the interior from which it was painted? In that case, the Paris cathedral is also a French window, with blue sky and white clouds seen in or through the glass; the green shrub is also a plant on the sill; the lines of the bridge are also the molding in the room; and—who knows?—the diagonals of the bank are also the easel on which this very painting was produced… 

– “The Ignorant Art Historian: View of Notre Dame“

The remaining three installments will drop weekly into May.

* “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” – Albert Einstein

###

As we appreciate art, we might recall that on this date in 1808, at the outbreak of the Peninsular War, the people of Madrid rose up in rebellion against French occupation. 

In 1814, Francisco de Goya memorialized the event in his painting The Second of May 1808.

source

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious”*…

Eminent art critic and historian Hal Foster has started what will be a four-part series in The Paris Review on looking at– and seeing– art…

Many of us look at art in the company of others; I have done so with a close friend, off and on, for five decades. We meet at a museum, wander around, settle on a painting (or, rather, it settles on us), look, talk, look more, talk more. We attend to the work and to each other; we enter its world together. Only recently and rarely have we written up our reactions, which we do individually. A testament to our friendship, this writing is also a tribute to the art, to the discursivity that informs it and the sociability that it allows. 

Paintings call out to us in myriad ways. My friend and I are most drawn to pictures that are reflexive about looking, that anticipate it, that sharpen it, that alter our habits of seeing. This may be a Modernist criterion, but it hardly disqualifies older art; we have ranged as far back as Early Netherlandish painting. In this selection, though, I focus on pictures that date from the past hundred and fifty years. (For better or worse, that’s also my academic field.)  

My aim in this exercise isn’t to tease out context, which is almost too present in wall texts today. Immediacy may be a mirage, but I try to come to my chosen works as directly as possible. It’s not that I ignore the texts on the walls; I just don’t get stuck there. I don’t pretend to see with a “period eye,” as Michael Baxandall called the attempt to perceive as historical viewers may have. Contextual information may often be necessary, but I keep it at a useful minimum. And though I sometimes get speculative, that’s part of the fun. In fact, one purpose of these studies is to be loosened from my scholarly superego (which isn’t very strong, in any case). I want to demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it. Ignorant Art History is a big tent.

Looking at a painting is a welcome respite from scanning a screen. In that sense, this exercise is reactive: I labor in the small cottage industry of attention that has sprouted up in the cracks of the massive complex of distraction all around us. A phenomenological turn often occurs at times of intensive mediation, but the point is not simply to have our perceptions mirrored back to us. T. J. Clark has put the aim nicely: “When I am in front of a picture the thing I most want is to enter the picture’s world: it is the possibility of doing so that makes pictures worth looking at for me.” To look at a painting is also to exit our world for a while, and then to return to it cast in a different—distant—light. The time travel is often wonderful, and almost free… 

– “The Ignorant Art Historian: An Introduction“

The first of his short essays, on the Matisse pictured above, just dropped…

… As we approach this painting, we have little idea of what it depicts, or whether it depicts anything at all. A washy blue covers the entire surface unevenly, and its space is traversed by several black vectors. A vertical line stretches the length of the canvas on the far right, where it intersects with two horizontal lines that cut across the center of the picture. In the lower half of the painting, three diagonal lines run roughly parallel to one another, also toward the right.

The main motif floats in the top third of the painting. Outlined heavily in black, its interior is made up of the same blue as elsewhere except for one white blotch and a few black planes, scratched to reveal the white underneath. Three thin, white planes also appear in the interior, each crossed with a horizontal black stripe; the central plane divides the space in two. 

All this is hard to sort out, and two more pieces on the right—a green blob beside a black one—only add to the puzzle. It is a complicated painting, but its complication is borne of simplicity. Completed in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, it is an austere work in an austere time. 

The title offers a kind of lifeline: View of Notre Dame. But what kind of view and from where? And what are all the black lines? Neither abstract nor representational, the painting requires a shift in our way of looking: its elements are less images of things than signs for them. 

We know that the Notre-Dame sits on the western end of the Île de la Cité in Paris. So the three diagonals might signify the quai along the Left Bank, the low path alongside the Seine, and the great river. The two horizontal lines then read as a bridge over the Seine, and the slight curve underneath them as its arched support. Finally, the long vertical line serves as the near edge of the quai, or perhaps of the very building from which the view is taken. The angles suggest that we look down on the scene from a Left Bank apartment several floors up. The overall blue signifies air and water where that seems appropriate, and anything else (or nothing at all) where it does not. 

How does the squarish motif convey the famous cathedral? If the bisected shape suggests the two great towers, the white plane between them might evoke the rose window. Since we view the cathedral from the Left Bank, it appears turned away from us slightly, its south side more exposed. If the black areas register the sides of the building in deep shadow, the white ones might signify the play of light across the facade. And the blobs in green and black? The green could be a plant, and the black its shadow. 

The pieces don’t add up completely or neatly. But then signification is about signaling-just-enough rather than representing-in-full. Here, seeing is guesswork. It often is elsewhere, too; we just don’t acknowledge it. Sometimes a sign doesn’t signify and sometimes it suggests more than one thing. The diagonals evoke both the quai and the river; the black areas convey a material thing here and an immaterial shadow there. 

Around this time, Matisse kept a studio above the quai Saint-Michel. Might View of Notre Dame double as a view of the interior from which it was painted? In that case, the Paris cathedral is also a French window, with blue sky and white clouds seen in or through the glass; the green shrub is also a plant on the sill; the lines of the bridge are also the molding in the room; and—who knows?—the diagonals of the bank are also the easel on which this very painting was produced… 

– “The Ignorant Art Historian: View of Notre Dame“

The remaining three installments will drop weekly into May.

* “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” – Albert Einstein

###

As we appreciate art, we might recall that on this date in 1808, at the outbreak of the Peninsular War, the people of Madrid rose up in rebellion against French occupation. 

In 1814, Francisco de Goya memorialized the event in his painting The Second of May 1808.

source

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious”*…

Eminent art critic and historian Hal Foster has started what will be a four-part series in The Paris Review on looking at– and seeing– art…

Many of us look at art in the company of others; I have done so with a close friend, off and on, for five decades. We meet at a museum, wander around, settle on a painting (or, rather, it settles on us), look, talk, look more, talk more. We attend to the work and to each other; we enter its world together. Only recently and rarely have we written up our reactions, which we do individually. A testament to our friendship, this writing is also a tribute to the art, to the discursivity that informs it and the sociability that it allows. 

Paintings call out to us in myriad ways. My friend and I are most drawn to pictures that are reflexive about looking, that anticipate it, that sharpen it, that alter our habits of seeing. This may be a Modernist criterion, but it hardly disqualifies older art; we have ranged as far back as Early Netherlandish painting. In this selection, though, I focus on pictures that date from the past hundred and fifty years. (For better or worse, that’s also my academic field.)  

My aim in this exercise isn’t to tease out context, which is almost too present in wall texts today. Immediacy may be a mirage, but I try to come to my chosen works as directly as possible. It’s not that I ignore the texts on the walls; I just don’t get stuck there. I don’t pretend to see with a “period eye,” as Michael Baxandall called the attempt to perceive as historical viewers may have. Contextual information may often be necessary, but I keep it at a useful minimum. And though I sometimes get speculative, that’s part of the fun. In fact, one purpose of these studies is to be loosened from my scholarly superego (which isn’t very strong, in any case). I want to demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it. Ignorant Art History is a big tent.

Looking at a painting is a welcome respite from scanning a screen. In that sense, this exercise is reactive: I labor in the small cottage industry of attention that has sprouted up in the cracks of the massive complex of distraction all around us. A phenomenological turn often occurs at times of intensive mediation, but the point is not simply to have our perceptions mirrored back to us. T. J. Clark has put the aim nicely: “When I am in front of a picture the thing I most want is to enter the picture’s world: it is the possibility of doing so that makes pictures worth looking at for me.” To look at a painting is also to exit our world for a while, and then to return to it cast in a different—distant—light. The time travel is often wonderful, and almost free… 

– “The Ignorant Art Historian: An Introduction“

The first of his short essays, on the Matisse pictured above, just dropped…

… As we approach this painting, we have little idea of what it depicts, or whether it depicts anything at all. A washy blue covers the entire surface unevenly, and its space is traversed by several black vectors. A vertical line stretches the length of the canvas on the far right, where it intersects with two horizontal lines that cut across the center of the picture. In the lower half of the painting, three diagonal lines run roughly parallel to one another, also toward the right.

The main motif floats in the top third of the painting. Outlined heavily in black, its interior is made up of the same blue as elsewhere except for one white blotch and a few black planes, scratched to reveal the white underneath. Three thin, white planes also appear in the interior, each crossed with a horizontal black stripe; the central plane divides the space in two. 

All this is hard to sort out, and two more pieces on the right—a green blob beside a black one—only add to the puzzle. It is a complicated painting, but its complication is borne of simplicity. Completed in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, it is an austere work in an austere time. 

The title offers a kind of lifeline: View of Notre Dame. But what kind of view and from where? And what are all the black lines? Neither abstract nor representational, the painting requires a shift in our way of looking: its elements are less images of things than signs for them. 

We know that the Notre-Dame sits on the western end of the Île de la Cité in Paris. So the three diagonals might signify the quai along the Left Bank, the low path alongside the Seine, and the great river. The two horizontal lines then read as a bridge over the Seine, and the slight curve underneath them as its arched support. Finally, the long vertical line serves as the near edge of the quai, or perhaps of the very building from which the view is taken. The angles suggest that we look down on the scene from a Left Bank apartment several floors up. The overall blue signifies air and water where that seems appropriate, and anything else (or nothing at all) where it does not. 

How does the squarish motif convey the famous cathedral? If the bisected shape suggests the two great towers, the white plane between them might evoke the rose window. Since we view the cathedral from the Left Bank, it appears turned away from us slightly, its south side more exposed. If the black areas register the sides of the building in deep shadow, the white ones might signify the play of light across the facade. And the blobs in green and black? The green could be a plant, and the black its shadow. 

The pieces don’t add up completely or neatly. But then signification is about signaling-just-enough rather than representing-in-full. Here, seeing is guesswork. It often is elsewhere, too; we just don’t acknowledge it. Sometimes a sign doesn’t signify and sometimes it suggests more than one thing. The diagonals evoke both the quai and the river; the black areas convey a material thing here and an immaterial shadow there. 

Around this time, Matisse kept a studio above the quai Saint-Michel. Might View of Notre Dame double as a view of the interior from which it was painted? In that case, the Paris cathedral is also a French window, with blue sky and white clouds seen in or through the glass; the green shrub is also a plant on the sill; the lines of the bridge are also the molding in the room; and—who knows?—the diagonals of the bank are also the easel on which this very painting was produced… 

– “The Ignorant Art Historian: View of Notre Dame“

The remaining three installments will drop weekly into May.

* “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” – Albert Einstein

###

As we appreciate art, we might recall that on this date in 1808, at the outbreak of the Peninsular War, the people of Madrid rose up in rebellion against French occupation. 

In 1814, Francisco de Goya memorialized the event in his painting The Second of May 1808.

source

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious”*…

Eminent art critic and historian Hal Foster has started what will be a four-part series in The Paris Review on looking at– and seeing– art…

Many of us look at art in the company of others; I have done so with a close friend, off and on, for five decades. We meet at a museum, wander around, settle on a painting (or, rather, it settles on us), look, talk, look more, talk more. We attend to the work and to each other; we enter its world together. Only recently and rarely have we written up our reactions, which we do individually. A testament to our friendship, this writing is also a tribute to the art, to the discursivity that informs it and the sociability that it allows. 

Paintings call out to us in myriad ways. My friend and I are most drawn to pictures that are reflexive about looking, that anticipate it, that sharpen it, that alter our habits of seeing. This may be a Modernist criterion, but it hardly disqualifies older art; we have ranged as far back as Early Netherlandish painting. In this selection, though, I focus on pictures that date from the past hundred and fifty years. (For better or worse, that’s also my academic field.)  

My aim in this exercise isn’t to tease out context, which is almost too present in wall texts today. Immediacy may be a mirage, but I try to come to my chosen works as directly as possible. It’s not that I ignore the texts on the walls; I just don’t get stuck there. I don’t pretend to see with a “period eye,” as Michael Baxandall called the attempt to perceive as historical viewers may have. Contextual information may often be necessary, but I keep it at a useful minimum. And though I sometimes get speculative, that’s part of the fun. In fact, one purpose of these studies is to be loosened from my scholarly superego (which isn’t very strong, in any case). I want to demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it. Ignorant Art History is a big tent.

Looking at a painting is a welcome respite from scanning a screen. In that sense, this exercise is reactive: I labor in the small cottage industry of attention that has sprouted up in the cracks of the massive complex of distraction all around us. A phenomenological turn often occurs at times of intensive mediation, but the point is not simply to have our perceptions mirrored back to us. T. J. Clark has put the aim nicely: “When I am in front of a picture the thing I most want is to enter the picture’s world: it is the possibility of doing so that makes pictures worth looking at for me.” To look at a painting is also to exit our world for a while, and then to return to it cast in a different—distant—light. The time travel is often wonderful, and almost free… 

– “The Ignorant Art Historian: An Introduction“

The first of his short essays, on the Matisse pictured above, just dropped…

… As we approach this painting, we have little idea of what it depicts, or whether it depicts anything at all. A washy blue covers the entire surface unevenly, and its space is traversed by several black vectors. A vertical line stretches the length of the canvas on the far right, where it intersects with two horizontal lines that cut across the center of the picture. In the lower half of the painting, three diagonal lines run roughly parallel to one another, also toward the right.

The main motif floats in the top third of the painting. Outlined heavily in black, its interior is made up of the same blue as elsewhere except for one white blotch and a few black planes, scratched to reveal the white underneath. Three thin, white planes also appear in the interior, each crossed with a horizontal black stripe; the central plane divides the space in two. 

All this is hard to sort out, and two more pieces on the right—a green blob beside a black one—only add to the puzzle. It is a complicated painting, but its complication is borne of simplicity. Completed in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, it is an austere work in an austere time. 

The title offers a kind of lifeline: View of Notre Dame. But what kind of view and from where? And what are all the black lines? Neither abstract nor representational, the painting requires a shift in our way of looking: its elements are less images of things than signs for them. 

We know that the Notre-Dame sits on the western end of the Île de la Cité in Paris. So the three diagonals might signify the quai along the Left Bank, the low path alongside the Seine, and the great river. The two horizontal lines then read as a bridge over the Seine, and the slight curve underneath them as its arched support. Finally, the long vertical line serves as the near edge of the quai, or perhaps of the very building from which the view is taken. The angles suggest that we look down on the scene from a Left Bank apartment several floors up. The overall blue signifies air and water where that seems appropriate, and anything else (or nothing at all) where it does not. 

How does the squarish motif convey the famous cathedral? If the bisected shape suggests the two great towers, the white plane between them might evoke the rose window. Since we view the cathedral from the Left Bank, it appears turned away from us slightly, its south side more exposed. If the black areas register the sides of the building in deep shadow, the white ones might signify the play of light across the facade. And the blobs in green and black? The green could be a plant, and the black its shadow. 

The pieces don’t add up completely or neatly. But then signification is about signaling-just-enough rather than representing-in-full. Here, seeing is guesswork. It often is elsewhere, too; we just don’t acknowledge it. Sometimes a sign doesn’t signify and sometimes it suggests more than one thing. The diagonals evoke both the quai and the river; the black areas convey a material thing here and an immaterial shadow there. 

Around this time, Matisse kept a studio above the quai Saint-Michel. Might View of Notre Dame double as a view of the interior from which it was painted? In that case, the Paris cathedral is also a French window, with blue sky and white clouds seen in or through the glass; the green shrub is also a plant on the sill; the lines of the bridge are also the molding in the room; and—who knows?—the diagonals of the bank are also the easel on which this very painting was produced… 

– “The Ignorant Art Historian: View of Notre Dame“

The remaining three installments will drop weekly into May.

* “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” – Albert Einstein

###

As we appreciate art, we might recall that on this date in 1808, at the outbreak of the Peninsular War, the people of Madrid rose up in rebellion against French occupation. 

In 1814, Francisco de Goya memorialized the event in his painting The Second of May 1808.

source

Xu Beihong painted a celestial nymph scattering flowers.
It sold for $440,000 (3.2M yuan).

But some online comments are brutal:
“Vacant stare. Looks totally done with life.”
“Cover half her face — the other half is beautiful.”

Painted in 1916, it blended Western watercolor shading with Chinese brush lines. Maybe the sadness was intentional?

#XuBeihong #ChineseArt #CelestialNymph #ArtCriticism #Painting #EarlyModernArt #OrientalMeetsWestern

Noah Davis | 4Columns

Noah Davis Aruna D’Souza A traveling retrospective of essential viewing makes an elegiac landing at the Philadelphia Museum…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Artsanddesign #4columns #art #artcriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Design #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/592629/

Noah Davis | 4Columns

Noah Davis Aruna D’Souza A traveling retrospective of essential viewing makes an elegiac landing at the Philadelphia Museum…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Artsanddesign #4columns #art #artcriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Design #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/592629/

The Avant-Garde Never Left: Robert Hughes Described the Revolution and Then Declared It Over

Robert Hughes wanted it both ways. In the final moments of “The Shock of the New,” his landmark 1980 BBC series on modern art, he declared the avant-garde dead and then, in the same breath, described its beating heart. He told us that the radical project of art was finished, that the market had swallowed it whole, that the institutions had filed its teeth down to nothing. And then he said this: the task of art is “done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.” That sentence is the avant-garde. Hughes described the thing he claimed to be burying.

The error is architectural. Hughes defines the avant-garde as a historical phenomenon: a set of movements, manifestos, gallery provocations, and collective shocks running roughly from the Impressionists through the Abstract Expressionists. When those movements exhausted themselves, when Warhol turned the commodity into the artwork and the artwork into the commodity, Hughes concluded that the engine had seized. The machine stopped. What remained was individual feeling, which he treated as a consolation prize, a lesser thing than the grand project of collective radical rupture.

But this gets the history backward. The movements were never the avant-garde. The movements were the institutional afterlife of individual radical acts. Manet did not paint “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” because Impressionism existed; Impressionism exists because Manet painted it. Duchamp’s urinal at the Society of Independent Artists generated Dada’s program, rather than the reverse. The individual act of creation came first. The movement was the footnote. Hughes, a man of enormous erudition, mistook the footnote for the text.

Consider what it means to make something that did not previously exist. A painter before a blank surface, a writer facing an empty page, a composer confronting silence: in each case, the creator is refusing the world as given. The world presented itself as complete, as finished, as requiring no additions, and the artist said: no, it is not enough. I will add to it. I will change it. That refusal is the most basic form of radicalism available to a human being. It precedes politics, manifestos, and every collective movement that has ever organized itself around a shared aesthetic vision. The individual act of creation is the ur-rebellion, and it has never stopped.

Hughes was right that the market absorbs, that institutions neutralize, that celebrity distorts. Where he was wrong was in believing that absorption, neutralization, and distortion constitute victory over the radical impulse. The market can only absorb what has already been made. It is always late. It arrives after the fact of creation, and by the time it has processed one radical act, another has already occurred somewhere else, in some studio or notebook or rehearsal room that the market has not yet found. The gap between creation and commodification is where the avant-garde lives, and that gap never closes, because creation always moves faster than consumption.

The argument here rests on structure, on the relationship between making and taking, rather than on any romantic claim about the special nature of artists. To make is to assert. To take is to react. The distinction separates creation from reproduction. Reproducing an existing emotional template, as a greeting card does, requires craft but generates no new form. The radical act lives in the imposition of a form that did not exist before the artist labored to bring it into being. The avant-garde, properly understood, describes the permanent condition of anyone who creates in this way, who produces rather than acquires, who generates form rather than purchasing it. Hughes, trapped in his art-historical periodization, could not see this because he was looking for the avant-garde in galleries and auction houses, which is rather like looking for water by studying plumbing.

The problem is also one of scale. Hughes was measuring radicalism by its social effects: did Cubism change how people see? Did Surrealism alter consciousness? Did Abstract Expressionism redefine the relationship between viewer and canvas? These are valid questions, but they all assume that the avant-garde must register at the cultural level to count. A playwright in a basement workshop in Queens, producing a piece of theatre that twelve people will see, is no less engaged in the radical act of creation than Picasso was when he painted “Guernica.” The scale differs. The act does not. If the avant-garde requires mass cultural disruption to qualify, then Hughes is right and it is finished. If the avant-garde is located in the act itself, in the decision to impose form on formlessness, then it is as alive as it has ever been and can never be otherwise.

Hughes’s own quote betrays his position. He says art’s task is “to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument, but through feeling.” Set aside for a moment the contestable claim that art works through feeling rather than argument (a dichotomy that would have puzzled Brecht, Sondheim, and Athol Fugard alike). Focus instead on the word “restore.” To restore the world is to insist that something has been lost, that the version of reality currently on offer is incomplete or broken, and that the artist’s labor can repair it. That insistence is oppositional, standing against the status quo and declaring: the world as you have arranged it is insufficient, and I will fix it with my hands. Call that whatever you like. I call it the avant-garde.

There is a further irony in Hughes’s lament that art’s “new job” is “to sit on the wall and get more expensive.” He is describing the art market, not art. The confusion is telling. By 1980, Hughes had spent nearly a decade at Time magazine, embedded in the very institutional apparatus he was critiquing. He knew the dealers, the collectors, the auction houses, and watched as art became a financial instrument before his eyes. But the view from inside the market is not the view from inside the studio. The artist making work at three in the morning, unsure whether anyone will ever see it, unsure whether it is any good, driven by the compulsion to articulate something that has no other available form of expression, is not thinking about auction prices. That artist is the avant-garde, and has been since the first person pressed a hand against a cave wall in Lascaux and said, in effect: I was here, and the world looked like this.

Hughes deserves credit for his honesty; he could see the degradation and named it without flinching. “The Shock of the New” remains a staggering piece of criticism precisely because Hughes refused to sentimentalize what he saw. But his conclusion was wrong, and it was wrong because he confused the institutional history of radical movements with the human capacity for radical acts. The movements have shelf lives, but the capacity to create does not expire. Every time a person creates something from nothing, the avant-garde begins again. It has no end because creation has no end. And the market, however powerful, however relentless, will always arrive too late to stop it.

Миленький текст про не-проблемность и удобство для власти современного искусства, про музейный маркетинг, про риторику о «тёмных временах» и про снисходительное отношение к зритель:ницам: https://kunstkritikk.com/the-end-is-nigh-ish/ #NoraArrheniusHagdahl #artcriticism #museums #generalpessimism #darktimes #condescending #press #KarolRadziszewski

https://www.europesays.com/ie/337217/ Ayoung Kim | 4Columns #4Columns #4columns #art #ArtCriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsDesign #ContemporaryArt #critic #culture #Design #Éire #Entertainment #film #FourColumns #IE #Ireland #magazine #MargaretSundell #Music #NewYorkArt #publications #Review #VisualArt

As I mentioned in a post I wrote a few minutes ago, Richard Wollheim's "Painting as an Art" has gripped me because it invites the reader to join the author in looking at pictures closely. His obituary mentions his own method as he applied it in galleries:

>> I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture that I was looking at. <<

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/nov/05/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries

Image: Richard Wollheim -- British Academy

#RichardWollheim #PaintingAsAnArt #PhilosophyOfArt #Aesthetics #ArtCriticism #Art #Philosophy

https://www.europesays.com/ie/315077/ Candice Lin | 4Columns #4Columns #4columns #art #ArtCriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsDesign #ContemporaryArt #critic #culture #Design #Éire #Entertainment #film #FourColumns #IE #Ireland #magazine #MargaretSundell #Music #NewYorkArt #publications #Review #VisualArt

https://www.europesays.com/ie/314730/ Wifredo Lam | 4Columns #4Columns #4columns #art #ArtCriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsDesign #ContemporaryArt #critic #culture #Design #Éire #Entertainment #film #FourColumns #IE #Ireland #magazine #MargaretSundell #Music #NewYorkArt #publications #Review #VisualArt

Wifredo Lam | 4Columns

Wifredo Lam Aruna D’Souza In his first comprehensive US retrospective, a demonstration of the Cuban artist’s practice as…
#NewsBeep #News #Artsanddesign #4columns #art #artcriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #CA #Canada #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Design #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/ca/445895/

Nicole Eisenman | 4Columns

Nicole Eisenman Aruna D’Souza Art in a time of war: an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and collages…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Artsanddesign #4columns #art #artcriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Design #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/403908/

Nicole Eisenman | 4Columns

Nicole Eisenman Aruna D’Souza Art in a time of war: an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and collages…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Artsanddesign #4columns #art #artcriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Design #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/403908/

Nicole Eisenman | 4Columns

Nicole Eisenman Aruna D’Souza Art in a time of war: an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and collages…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Artsanddesign #4columns #art #artcriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Design #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/402888/

Nicole Eisenman | 4Columns

Nicole Eisenman Aruna D’Souza Art in a time of war: an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and collages…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Artsanddesign #4columns #art #artcriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Design #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/402888/

https://www.europesays.com/ie/277186/ Nicole Eisenman | 4Columns #4Columns #4columns #art #ArtCriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsDesign #ContemporaryArt #critic #culture #Design #Éire #Entertainment #film #FourColumns #IE #Ireland #magazine #MargaretSundell #Music #NewYorkArt #publications #Review #VisualArt

https://www.europesays.com/ie/243114/ Mimosa Echard | 4Columns #4Columns #4columns #art #ArtCriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsDesign #ContemporaryArt #critic #culture #Design #Éire #Entertainment #film #FourColumns #IE #Ireland #magazine #MargaretSundell #Music #NewYorkArt #publications #Review #VisualArt

https://www.europesays.com/ie/241226/ ECHO DELAY REVERB | 4Columns #4Columns #4columns #art #ArtCriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsDesign #ContemporaryArt #critic #culture #Design #Éire #Entertainment #film #FourColumns #IE #Ireland #magazine #MargaretSundell #Music #NewYorkArt #publications #Review #VisualArt

https://www.europesays.com/ie/230441/ The Studio Museum in Harlem #4Columns #4columns #art #ArtCriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsDesign #ContemporaryArt #critic #culture #Design #Éire #Entertainment #film #FourColumns #IE #Ireland #magazine #MargaretSundell #Music #NewYorkArt #publications #Review #VisualArt

Ruth Asawa | 4Columns

Ruth Asawa Aruna D’Souza The artist’s endless appetite for all manner of making and creativity is on display…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Artsanddesign #4columns #art #artcriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Design #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/294991/

Ruth Asawa | 4Columns

Ruth Asawa Aruna D’Souza The artist’s endless appetite for all manner of making and creativity is on display…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Artsanddesign #4columns #art #artcriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Design #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/294991/

Read a good food studies book lately? Seen a food-art show or a kitchen design expo? Marathoned a food documentary series? Canadian Food Studies is always looking for book, media, art, and event reviews! Email the Reviews Editor (reviews [aht] canadian food studies [dawt] ca) or click on the “Submit a request” button on the journal’s landing page (canadianfoodstudies.ca).

#FoodStudies
#FoodArt
#FoodBooks
#FoodTV
#FoodDesign
#FoodFilms
#BookReviews
#FilmReviews
#TVReviews
#ArtCriticism
#Design
#ResearchCreation

image: David Szanto

https://www.europesays.com/uk/487996/ Big Kiss, Bye-Bye | 4Columns #4Columns #4columns #Art #ArtCriticism. #Books #ContemporaryArt #critic #Culture #Entertainment #film #FourColumns #Magazine #MargaretSundell #music #NewYorkArt #publications #Review #UK #UnitedKingdom #VisualArt

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye | 4Columns

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye Jessi Jezewska Stevens A setup familiar to contemporary fiction and romance ends up defying expectations…
#NewsBeep #News #Books #4columns #Art #artcriticism #AU #Australia #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Entertainment #film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/202514/

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye | 4Columns

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye Jessi Jezewska Stevens A setup familiar to contemporary fiction and romance ends up defying expectations…
#NewsBeep #News #Books #4columns #Art #artcriticism #Contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #UK #UnitedKingdom #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/uk/189974/

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye | 4Columns

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye Jessi Jezewska Stevens A setup familiar to contemporary fiction and romance ends up defying expectations…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Books #4columns #art #artcriticism #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/213815/

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye | 4Columns

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye Jessi Jezewska Stevens A setup familiar to contemporary fiction and romance ends up defying expectations…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Books #4columns #art #artcriticism #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/213815/

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye | 4Columns

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye Jessi Jezewska Stevens A setup familiar to contemporary fiction and romance ends up defying expectations…
#NewsBeep #News #Books #4columns #art #artcriticism #CA #Canada #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/ca/202194/

The Fall 2025 Preview | 4Columns

The Fall 2025 Preview | 4Columns





…
#NewsBeep #News #Artsanddesign #4columns #Art #artcriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #AU #Australia #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Design #Entertainment #film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/104513/

Critic’s Picks: Albums of the Summer

Critic’s Picks: Albums of the Summer 4 Columns Songs to sweat by: a roundup of four new music…
#NewsBeep #News #Music #4columns #art #artcriticism #CA #Canada #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/ca/71805/

Critic’s Picks: Albums of the Summer

Critic’s Picks: Albums of the Summer 4 Columns Songs to sweat by: a roundup of four new music…
#NewsBeep #News #Music #4columns #art #artcriticism #CA #Canada #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/ca/71805/

Critic’s Picks: Exhibitions of the Summer

Critic’s Picks: Exhibitions of the Summer 4 Columns A quartet of art recommendations, spanning both sides of the…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Artsanddesign #4columns #art #artcriticism #Arts #ArtsAndDesign #contemporaryart #critic #Culture #Design #Entertainment #Film #fourcolumns #magazine #margaretsundell #Music #newyorkart #publications #review #visualart
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/73543/

“Unsurprisingly, this brash ignorance of an entire (sub-)domain of art triggered a cauldron of boiling responses from various critics…” – Laurence Counihan in his recent Circa text, ‘Introduction to «an_archaeology_of_the_future»‘

http://cmag.cc/20691

#VisualArts #Ireland #NorthernIreland #ArtIreland #Mastodaoine #ArtCriticism #ArtWriting #CIRCA

Philately meets brutality, unfortunately, in the work of FX Harsono, discussed by Prioni

#VisualArts #Ireland #NorthernIreland #ArtIreland #ArtCriticism #ArtWriting #CIRCA

Content warning: some images are upsetting
cmag.cc/20843

Prioni juxtaposes the photographic approaches of René Castro and Manit Sriwanichpoom; photo-based, one looks to the (then) future, the other mocks the (then) present

#VisualArts #Ireland #NorthernIreland #ArtIreland #ArtCriticism #ArtWriting #CIRCA

Content warning: some images are upsetting
cmag.cc/20843

The thesis of Amirahvelda Priyono’s new photo essay for Circa, commissioned by Brian Curtin, is straightforward: conflict is similar the world over; not denying the specifics of a given struggle, art-related visual imagery is a powerful communicator across cultures.
Content warning: some of the images are upsetting.

http://cmag.cc/20843

#VisualArts #Ireland #NorthernIreland #ArtIreland #Mastodaoine #ArtCriticism #ArtWriting

‘The blank page was the most complete the work could be…’ Landers drew from a Circa column in 1999 by Michael Cunningham; while demonstrating the power of less, he also points to one very shocking image…
https://circaartmagazine.net/issues/issue87/?pg=7
#VisualArts #Ireland #NorthernIreland #ArtIreland #ArtCriticism #ArtWriting #CIRCA

"The blank page was the most complete the work could be…" Landers drew from a Circa column in 1999 by Michael Cunningham; while demonstrating the power of less, he also points to one very shocking image…
https://circaartmagazine.net/issues/issue87/?pg=7
#VisualArts #Ireland #NorthernIreland #ArtIreland #Mastodaoine #ArtCriticism #ArtWriting #CIRCA

NB: Content warning re ALT text

In Julie Landers‘ ‘Information Underload’, a new text / art project for Circa commissioned by Laurence Counihan, the artist reverse-engineers the ‘bloat’ of her nostalgia as she observes Cork mutate
https://cmag.cc/20800
#VisualArts #Ireland #NorthernIreland #ArtIreland #ArtCriticism #ArtWriting #CIRCA #Cork

One of the Circa texts Nurul Kaiyisah targets, re “the lacuna of women in art histories,” is that of Anne Carlisle on Vivien Burnside back in 1984 (https://circaartmagazine.net/issues/issue17/?pg=32&dbl=y); quite robust by Anne Carlisle!
#VisualArts #Ireland #NorthernIreland #ArtIreland #ArtCriticism #ArtWriting #Circa

Exploring women and art in the two regions, Kaiyisah draws from Circa’s huge archive – e.g., Jack Packenham on Alice Maher (https://circaartmagazine.net/issues/issue39?pg=38), Fionna Barber on Sonia Boyce (https://circaartmagazine.net/issues/issue34?pg=40), and more – but also juxtaposes global issues of then and now

#VisualArts #Ireland #NorthernIreland #ArtIreland #ArtCriticism #ArtWriting #CIRCA #mastodaoine

Fascinating new ‘letter’ by Singapore-based Nurul Kaiyisah, in which she juxtaposes a former Ireland and a current South-east Asia. Part of the ‘Travelling South, in Theory’ series commission by Brian Curtin. https://circaartmagazine.net?p=20639
#VisualArts #Ireland #NorthernIreland #ArtIreland #ArtCriticism #ArtWriting #CIRCA

The world's meanest art review as fuel source #art #artcriticism https://artologica.substack.com/p/sticks-and-stones

Tom Crewe on Walter Sickert. Brilliant art writing.
#impressionism #arthisto4y #review #artcriticism #britishart @arthistory
#mastoart
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n16/tom-crewe/real-busters

Gita Jackson on Aftermath: “The sad but unavoidable truth is that there is very little justice in cases like these. James Somerton has already stolen my work — the damage has already been done, and it cannot be undone. I have to move throughout the world knowing that an injustice has been done to me; that is just an unfortunate reality of being alive. Somerton makes himself an easy target for all the anger that people feel about similar injustices, like the way that queer history is disappeared or misrepresented or the way that women working in criticism are often ignored.”

https://aftermath.site/please-stop-asking-me-to-sue-james-somerton

#JamesSomerton #HBomberguy #YouTube #VideoEssays #ArtCriticism #QueerArt