Articles
Ripe for Rediscovery: Peter Miller
Talk about “Surrealism” in conversation with artists and art lovers you are most likely to think of works by Dalí, Magritte, Tanguy, Ernst, or possibly Paul Delvaux. Mention “American Surrealism,” and the terrain gets tricky. Didn’t Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and...
Cindy Blakeslee
Cindy Blakeslee’s sculptures startle with unexpected collisions of found objects: Nails bristle, almost angrily, from shapely chunks of wood. Papier-mâché eggs lie cradled in a nest of shredded maps, suspended from delicate chains. A marbled rock supports a...
L.A. Confidential
The first in a series of reports on the art world. In May, it seemed like we were almost entirely out of the woods with Covid-19, and then along came the Delta variant and the post-pandemic euphoria rapidly dissipated. Still, as long-time observers of the Los Angeles...
The Immortal Mona Lisa
A new novel recalls a famous heist. I’ve just finished reading Jonathan Santlofer’s hugely entertaining thriller The Last Mona Lisa, a lively yarn that taps into our present-day fascination with all things Leonardo and takes the reader into the sometimes violent...
My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Four
Many say it’s all a bubble. I don’t agree because the world is sick producing extremes of weather and behavior, people are struggling and if creators can find a way to express themselves or promote a worthy cause AND make money then It is not going away anytime soon
Timothy Nero
Timothy Nero works in three different mediums—sculpture, painting, and drawing—reflecting a broad spectrum of moods and mental states. In paintings on canvas or panels, lines and ribbon-like tendrils can appear to be spiraling out of control, willfully taking off in...
The Educated Eye Part Two
I opened up an intriguing cauldron of worms when I asked a bevy of art writers (call them critics, journalists, or simply reviewers) on what it means to have an “eye.” Why did they consider their judgments superior to those of the average museumgoer or art lover? The...
The Educated Eye, Part One
Why is an art critic’s judgment better than yours—or maybe not? A few months back I did a stupid thing on Facebook and opined that I did not think Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor was very good (check out the hands and drapery), and that I found her pose in a...
My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Three
Red Bishop (detail) from Filippucci's NFT Chess Series Collection NOTE: If you’re just seeing Part Three of my Blockhead Adventures, it might prove helpful to back up to Part One and Part Two first. MY FIRST NFT THAT IS NOT FOR SALE (yet). This animation will be set...
More Instagram Insights
Investing a little time and energy can mean more followers, more sales, and more shows By Valeri Larko A little more than a year ago, I declared myself totally done with posts about Instagram. I’d written three on the subject of how to use this addictive tool, and I...
Fantasy Curating: Perfectly Imperfect
By Jina Brenneman Post-disciplinary, Neo Craft, Sloppy Craft, and the Hyper Pot are all descriptors that attempt to classify the seismic shift in contemporary ceramics. Artificial in nature, these technicolor works drip with irregularities, gloppy blobs, and bulges...
My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Two: “Your Move”
The Lady Bishop (detail) from Filippucci's "Chess Series" YOUR MOVE After getting acquainted with the basic elements of NFTs (see PART ONE), my next move was to purchase some Ethereum cryptocurrency to pay for the “gas” fees to have each “minted” and put up for...
Fantasy Curating: Fantastical Threads
By Adria Arch Lately, I have been especially drawn to both two- and three-dimensional artwork that uses fabrics and fibers. The vibrant colors and patterns, sculptural shapes, and thumbing-the-nose at the traditional stone-and-steel crowd are all part of what I find...
My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part One
The Red Queen from Filippucci's "Chess Series" By Sandra Filippucci I’m about to enter a new and revolutionary digital art market. A traditionally trained artist of the Boomer generation, I've been working with technology since the mid-1980s in both my own work and...
Suggestions for Summer Reading
Get a jump on the season with a beach-bag full of memoirs Perhaps because I’ve been working on one of my own (“Rotten Romance,” dispatched via Substack every Sunday), memoirs have been much on my mind. For purely recreational reading, I often prefer first-person...
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