Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

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Obit watch: January 14, 2022.

Friday, January 14th, 2022

Terry Teachout, critic, blogger, playwright, cultural commentator, and biographer, passed away yesterday.

“About Last Night” blog. WSJ (through archive.is). National Review.

I wrote briefly about him and his blog when his wife died. I was still an irregular follower – I tried to check in once a week – but I knew he had found a new love and was excited about that. This seems especially unfair.

On Twitter, he described himself as a “critic, biographer, playwright, director, unabashed Steely Dan fan, ardent philosemite.”

Though he led a sophisticated life of culture in New York, Mr. Teachout retained some of his small-town earnestness. “I still wear plaid shirts and think in Central Standard Time,” he wrote in his memoir. “I still eat tuna casserole with potato chips on top and worry about whether the farmers back home will get enough rain this year.”

I never met Mr. Teachout, though I would have liked to. He seems like one of those good decent people whose passing leaves a void in the world.

Edited to add: tribute from Rod Dreher.

Posted in Art, Books, Media, Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Tweet of the day.

Wednesday, January 5th, 2022

Explained:

Runner-up:

Posted in Art, Geek | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 9, 2021.

Thursday, December 9th, 2021

Lina Wertmüller, Italian director.

In the broad sense, Ms. Wertmüller was a political filmmaker, but no one could ever quite figure out what the politics were.

By way of Lawrence, Christos Achilleos, SF artist.

Posted in Art, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Administrative note.

Thursday, October 21st, 2021

I value and highly esteem all of the people who comment here.

(Except Eric from talk to customer dot com or whatever it is today. He can die in a fire.)

If I don’t respond to your comment, it isn’t because I don’t like you. It may be because I don’t have time. It may be because you said what needed to be said and responding “Mega dittos, Rush!” would be as superfluous as painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

(Duchamp did it.)

(You know, if you’re going to put a button on your page that says “Order Oil Painting Reproduction”, when I push that button…take me to the page where I can actually order an oil painting reproduction of that specific piece, not your generic art page.)

(Of course, the original wasn’t an oil painting anyway, so an oil painting reproduction would be odd.)

(“1940, Paris
Color reproduction, made by Duchamp from original version
Stolen in 1981 and never recovered”

Yet another piece to add to the “decorate my house with reproductions of stolen art” list.)

But I digress.

Anyway, thank you to all my valued commenters, especially the ones who have been commenting over the past week or so. This isn’t prompted by anything in particular or any specific complaints. Just wanted to get this on the hysterical record.

Posted in Admin, Art | 2 Comments »

Art, damn it, art! watch (#60 in a series)

Friday, October 8th, 2021

This could be an obit watch, too, but I thought I’d go in this direction.

Over his long, provocative career, the artist Billy Apple changed his name, registered it as a trademark, branded products with it, had his genome sequenced and, finally, arranged to have his cells extracted and stored so that they might survive forever even if he could not. He died on Sept. 6 at his home in Auckland, New Zealand, at 85.

…

By 1964 he was in New York City (subletting a loft on the Bowery from the sculptor Eva Hesse) and showing his work. His cast bronze, half-eaten watermelon slice was one of many objects included in “The American Supermarket,” an early Pop spectacle at the Bianchini Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where one could buy artist’s versions of real products: a painted turkey by Roy Lichtenstein, candy made by Claes Oldenburg and Campbell’s soup cans signed by Andy Warhol. The gallerist took orders on a grocer’s pad.

…

Mr. Apple went on to work in neon, enchanting some reviewers like Robert Pincus-Witten of Artforum magazine, who described Mr. Apple’s rainbows as “sensuous neon impersonations.” But city inspectors were not charmed. In 1966, when Mr. Apple was 27, they unplugged a show of his at the Pepsi Gallery, in the lobby of the Pepsi-Cola Building at Park Avenue and 59th Street, saying the pieces weren’t wired to code.
The show’s opening had been so well attended that it caused a traffic jam. One attendee was Tom Wolfe, who later panned Mr. Apple’s pieces in New York Magazine — “they’re limp … they splutter,” he wrote. (Mr. Wolfe was writing about the artistry of commercial neon sign makers and poking fun at the art world in the process.)

…

Their art-making methods — Mr. Apple went through a tidying phase, washing windows, scrubbing floor tiles and vacuuming up the dirt on his studio’s roof — were not always well received. His “Roof Dirt” piece, which came in the form of an invitation in 1971, prompted John Canaday of The New York Times to write that it “belongs to an area of art‐related activity in which nothing but the word of the artists makes the difference between a put‐on and a seriously offered project.”
Mr. Apple then turned to less festive practices, like saving tissues from his nosebleeds and toilet paper from his bathroom activities. When this work was included in a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, some objected, and the police shut it down. But Mr. Apple was no prankster. He was deadly serious about his work, which, besides meticulously documenting his bodily processes, often included renovation and redecorating suggestions to institutions like the Guggenheim. (He proposed getting rid of its planters; the museum ignored him.)
Back home in New Zealand, to which he returned for good in 1990, Mr. Apple began exploring, in a variety of work, ideas about the transactional nature of the art market, branding practices, mapping and scientific advances. Among the works was an apple cast from pure gold, Billy Apple coffee and tea (for sale in galleries only) and the “immortalization” of cells from his own body, which are now stored at the American Type Culture Collection and the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland.

…

In 2016, Mr. Apple donated some of his early career bathroom tissues along with a contemporary fecal sample to a molecular biologist, who was able to determine that nearly half of the bacteria in Mr. Apple’s gut was still present in his body decades later, as The New Zealand Herald reported. It was a boon for science, and Mr. Apple, too, made new work from the study.

Posted in Art, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 6, 2021.

Tuesday, July 6th, 2021

Richard Donner. THR. Variety.

I feel like he’s been getting the tributes he deserves, and don’t really have much to add to those. Other than: what a career.

Hash Halper. No, you never heard of him: this is one of those kind of obits the NYT does well.

Sometime around 2014, little hearts drawn in chalk mysteriously began appearing on the streets of downtown Manhattan. Some materialized in clusters on sidewalks, while others cascaded along blocks. The hearts inevitably faded away, but for New Yorkers who encountered them, they offered a respite from the harshness of city life.
At least that was the intention of their creator, a street artist named Hash Halper, who started drawing the hearts as a gesture of affection for a woman he was dating. The relationship didn’t last, but the hearts made him feel better, so he kept drawing them. Mr. Halper soon began spreading the healing properties of his hearts, calling himself New York Romantic.
“A heart makes you feel good when you’re not feeling good,” Mr. Halper told Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News” in 2018. “And a heart makes you feel great when you’re feeling great.”

…

Tall and shaggy-haired, Mr. Halper could be seen wearing stylish hats or a red suit covered in hearts while he planted himself on streets for hours, bringing his hearts into existence with pieces of pink, blue and yellow chalk and a swift swoop of his hand. Over time, he became something of a downtown folk hero, cherished for his ability to conjure up positivity with a humble shard of chalk.
Once, when he learned that a woman was having a rough time with her romantic life, he began chalking hearts outside her workplace; she met someone special a few weeks later.

But:

He grappled with sobriety. When he had jobs, he didn’t hold them for long. He was at times homeless and would sleep on the benches of Washington Square Park or the couches of friends. His family had paid his rent over the past year in an apartment on Broome Street that he shared with roommates.
“He didn’t tell people that he was troubled because it was dissonant with his public persona,” his brother Omkar Lewis said. “He was the heart guy, so he couldn’t reveal his problems to the world, because he was the guy carrying other people’s pain.”

…

Shortly before his death, Mr. Halper, who was also a painter, had been preparing for a solo exhibition at a venue on Hudson Street that would showcase his artwork. But, his family said, his paintings were destroyed during an altercation with someone who attacked him in his Lower East Side apartment. Rattled by the incident, he took to the streets and was seen two days later walking barefoot in SoHo.

According to his family, he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge on June 11th. He was 41.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Posted in Art, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 11, 2021.

Friday, June 11th, 2021

Gottfried Böhm, Pritzker Prize-winning Brutalist architect. He was 101.

Arguably the defining work of Mr. Böhm’s career was the Roman Catholic Pilgrimage Church at Neviges, known in German as the Wallfahrtsdom or the Mariendom, close to the city of Wuppertal in northwest Germany.
Completed in 1968, it is a monumental Brutalist Gesamtkunstwerk or total of work of art, whose jagged concrete roof has been likened to a tent, a crystal and an iceberg. Set at the top of a hill, the church rises imposingly above the picturesque houses of medieval Neviges.
Mr. Böhm lavished as much attention on the church’s forum-like interior as he did on its folding roof and sculptural facade, with their rough concrete textures and sharp angles. He designed the stained-glass windows, lamps and door handles and even the chairs. With room for 8,000 worshipers, it is the second largest church north of the Alps.

Posted in Art, Obits | 1 Comment »

Art, damn it, art! watch (#59 in a series)

Thursday, June 10th, 2021

I don’t want to draw too much on the NY Post. But Mike the Musicologist sent this to me with a challenge:

An Italian artist sold an invisible sculpture for over $18,000 and had to give the buyer a certificate of authenticity to prove it’s real, the Daily Mail reported.

“The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that ‘nothing’ has a weight,” the Sardinian-born artist explained, according to Hypebeast. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”

…

This isn’t the first piece of Garau’s that is unrecognizable to the human eye. In February, the artist exhibited “Buddha In Contemplation,” another invisible sculpture at the Piazza della Scala in Milan. And just this week, Garau installed his most recent statue, “Afrodite Piange,” facing the New York Stock Exchange.

Edited to add: I was unaware of this previously, but it popped up on Hacker News after I posted. I know, he only has 501 views as I write, but it seems like a good commentary. Or at least I found it mildly amusing.

Warning! Mime! Achtung! Mime! Avvertimento! Mimo! Avertissement! Mime!

Warning! Mime! Achtung! Mime! Avvertimento! Mimo! Avertissement! Mime!

Posted in Art | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 385

Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

Today’s my birthday, so I’m queuing this up in advance. I thought I’d try to do something a little different today, maybe go back to some things I haven’t done in a while.

Like trains.

“Last of the Giants”. This appears to be a Union Pacific documentary about their “Big Boy” steam locomotives, which they operated in “revenue service” until 1959. UP still operates one “Big Boy” and one “800 Series” locomotive for promotional purposes.

Interestingly, the “Big Boy” has actually been converted to run on oil:

Bonus: Do you like people speaking with Russian accents? Do you like Zippos? I like Zippos. Most of the time, I can take or leave Russian accents.

By way of “CrazyRussianHacker“, “7 Zippo Gadgets You Did NOT Know Exist”.

It doesn’t (generally) get that cold in Texas, but I kind of want one of those Zippo hand warmers anyway. I remember my dad used to have something similar kicking around, but he didn’t use it much in my memory, because it doesn’t (generally) get that cold in Texas. There have been some New Year’s Eve’s when we’ve been setting off fireworks, though…

Bonus #2: Here’s a bit of a time capsule for you. It could also fall under “Travel Thursday”, but I’m not putting it there for two reasons. One, this is different.

The “Museum of Automata” in York. Apparently, this was filmed sometime in the 1990s.

Reason number two is that, sadly, from what I’ve found on the Internet, the museum closed quite a while ago.

Bonus #3: I will freely admit, I am posting this one to tweak someone who says “‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ f–king ruled!” (My own personal opinion: the monster fight scenes were pretty good. Unfortunately, there was an excess of humans and human interaction in the movie, and I really didn’t like any of the humans. The kaiju film that would “f–king rule” for me would be the monster equivalent of “The Raid: Redemption”: maybe two minutes of introductory setup, two minutes of epilogue, and 116 minutes of giant monsters fighting.)

Anyway, C.W. Lemoine ruins the first fight scene from “Godzilla vs. Kong”.

To be honest, I thought the movie looked a lot better on the screen at the Alamo than it does in this video. Also, to be fair, it is just a TV show movie: I should really just relax.

Edited to add 4/20: Hand to God, I had no idea Lawrence was even working on this, much less planning to post it today.

Bonus #4: I see a lot of folks talking about minimizing their lifestyle, and stripping away almost everything to the point where they can live almost completely out of a van. (I see very few of these folks who have toilets in their vans: apparently, when they need a bathroom, they find one at a gym, gas station, store, or other place of public accommodation. But I digress.)

Have you ever listened to these folks talk, or read any of their praises for van life, and asked yourself, “Self, what do these people do when it is -20 degrees? -20 Communist Centigrade degrees, too, not -4 American Fahrenheit degrees.” (See, by converting from Centigrade to Fahrenheit, you’ve already made yourself feel warmer. If you go a step beyond and convert to 455 degrees Rankine, you’ll probably give yourself heat stroke.)

Well, here you go.

Bonus #5: Okay, I know I’m posting a lot of stuff today. Consider this a present on my birthday to you, my loyal readers.

Have you ever asked yourself, while stoned on your couch, “Self, what ever happened to all those paintings Bob Ross painted?”

I’m going to guess: probably not, because I don’t think most of you are stoners. But just in case, the NYT (who probably are a bunch of stoners, judging from some of the crazy (stuff) they publish these days) investigated. Here’s what they found.

Posted in Art, History, Movies, Planes, Trains | 2 Comments »

I haven’t laughed so hard since the hogs et my kid brother.

Wednesday, March 17th, 2021

Ja Rule is getting into the NFT space. The rapper plans to sell a piece of art that once hung at Fyre Media’s headquarters in New York City.

Ah, the Fyre Festival. Brings back memories.

Posted in Art, Stupid | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 301

Tuesday, January 26th, 2021

I would call this “True Crime Tuesday” but there’s some other jerkface out there who does that already.

I did think it might be fun to do some stuff at the intersection of crime and art.

“The Mystery Conman – The Murky Business of Counterfeit Antiques”.

Bonus: “Stealing the Mona Lisa”.

Posted in Art, History, Law | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#58 in a series)

Friday, December 25th, 2020

No snark this time: I think this is kind of neat (both the art and the tweet):

Posted in Art | Comments Closed

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