Picture This

“If you want to replenish your visual thinking, you have to go back to nature,” David Hockney says in Bruno Wollheim’s film David Hockney: A Bigger Picture , “because there’s the infinite there, meaning you can’t think it up.” That film captures Hockney painting many of the amazing landscapes that ... Read More

A new tour at the Museum of Modern Art in New York has many seeing red over “seeing” Reds in the collection. As reported in Art News, Artist Yevgeniy Fiks’ “performative tour” titled simply enough “Communist Tour of MoMA” begins with the current exhibition Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of ... Read More

What drives an artist to destroy something they spent their time and energy on to create? Hatred? Self-disgust? Embarassment? Fear of how it might be interpreted or misinterpreted? German artist Gerhard Richter, set to celebrate his 80th birthday on February 9th and receive all the accolades and ... Read More

Like doctors, artists should obey one rule above all, “To do no harm.” When you’re Christo and you specialize in “environmental art,” that rule takes on an even greater importance. Christo’s latest project, titled “Over the River,” hopes to hang 5.9 miles of "silvery, translucent" panels along the ... Read More

One of the biggest problems with lists is that with lists come labels. A list of African-American artists or women artists already sets them up as different (and perhaps less, somehow) than artists on another list. But sometimes lists also celebrate difference and how individuals overcome ... Read More

“All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up,” says washed-up silent film star Norma Desmond in the final scene of Billy Wilder’s unforgettable 1950 film Sunset Boulevard . Gloria Swanson caps off her Oscar-nominated performance as Norma by walking into the camera’s lens and revealing in that ... Read More

If you saw someone dying before your eyes, wouldn’t you do everything possible to save them? Is there ever a case when saving someone (or something) is the wrong choice? In a recent article on Art Watch UK titled “What Price a Smile? The Louvre Leonardo Mouths that are Now at Risk,” Michael Daley ... Read More

What is that “Presidential” look? Consciously or subconsciously, American voters ask themselves that question every four years on the way to the ballot box. Is it the Mount Rushmore-ready chin, the never-retreating hairline, or the ideally symmetrical smile to which we surrender our hearts ... Read More

“The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist—that it’s a godlike thing,” performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson says in an interview in the January 2012 issue of Believer magazine. In addition to that interesting take on the godhood ... Read More

Using money she had received for her 30th birthday, Zoe Strauss bought a camera in 2000 and began shooting a 10-year project that had previously existed only in her imagination. The urban landscape of Philadelphia and its inhabitants soon found a new herald and champion in Strauss, who dreamed of ... Read More

My first introduction to newspaper reading was the Sunday comics. Stretched out on the floor beside my Dad, both of us propped up on our elbows, we read everything from Andy Capp to Ziggy . But my first introduction to reading a newspaper like an adult was the editorial cartoon. Pat Oliphant, Jeff ... Read More

Long before she ever met John Lennon, Yoko Ono established herself as a significant international avant-garde artist. With John by her side, Yoko’s political performance art found a larger audience to witness the "Bed-In for Peace" and Bagism. Alas, the idealism of the late 1960s that helped foster ... Read More

If you know the name of artist Chris Burden, you probably think pain: shooting, electrocution, and even crucifixion. Although Burden ended his agonizing exploits over 35 years ago, those performance art pieces remain his most memorable work. Metropolis II (shown above), a gigantic kinetic sculpture ... Read More

Last month saw the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the United States into World War II. Sadly, that day of infamy led to a different kind of infamy for America in the form of the Japanese Internment Camps initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signature on Executive ... Read More

By pulling her pants down and defacing Clyfford Still’s painting 1957-J No. 2 (PH-401) (shown above, from 1957) last week at The Clyfford Still Museum, Carmen Lucette Tisch stumbled drunkenly into the annals of art vandals and, however misguidedly, art critics. Experts estimate that Tisch’s tush rub ... Read More