- Weekend Links: The value and values of art
Anyone reading this blog likely comes with the agreement that art has a value. The links this weekend explore how we come to determine that value, either in terms of credibility, money or action figures and video games. Takashi Murakami as action figure by Mike Leavitt (Source: artinfo.com) Are critics the best thing for art [...]
- ‘The Birds and the Bees’ and more in C Magazine
Reviewing exhibitions for the quarterly art magazine circuit is an exercise in deferred pleasure, but it’s well worth the surprise of having a freshly printed issue materialize in your mailbox as a friendly reminder that yes, you did write something a few months ago, didn’t you? Not to mention, new magazine smell. The most recent [...]
- Trending the 2011 Sobey Ontario Long List
The viewer’s subjective experience accounts for a lot more in art criticism than I think most art writers would be willing to admit. Experiences as varied as the weather outside or the latest article rattling around inside one’s head has impacted my viewing of countless exhibitions over the years. While many of these involuntary associations [...]
- James North Art Crawl: A June Observation
While I can’t claim to have done so with perfect consistency, I have been attending and writing coverage of the James North Art Crawl since October 2007. Looking back on that first distant report from the days when Hamilton Artists Inc. was on Colbourne and I was, amazingly, even more jaded than I am today [...]
- Diamonds are a cynic’s best friend
I’ve become happily accustomed to agreeing with much of what The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones has to say about art. For example, I agree on the whole with the defence he mounts in favour of his standing assertion that Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God is an important work of art that accurately reflects the [...]
- Where art goes once it is born
I’ve been taxing my memory and the internet’s broad-yet-dubious selection of Vincent van Gogh images to prepare a post on Dr. Alison McQueen’s lecture last week for the Friends of Art History at McMaster, but in the meantime I’ve been more inclined to use my rare downtime for reading, especially now that I’ve come into [...]
- Calling from Canada: The Great, White, Vacant North
I’ve been a regular reader of Art:21′s blog (affiliated with the PBS educational series, Art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century) for quite a long while now, and was happy for the recent opportunity to contribute a post to their current Flash Points topic. Of the many art blogs I follow, Art:21 fosters the sort of academic [...]
- Link: Picasso as Porn Star
I’ve often maintained that it takes a certain colloquialism – not to mention a willingness to ease off some of the sexier phrases one learns at art school – to get the general public engaged in critical art dialogues. There’s merit to be had in bringing art down to a universal level, and clearly Howard [...]
- Lessons from Proust and a cyborg-crab
“Do you know what Proust said about conversation?” Mahnmut resisted another sigh. “What?” “He said… ‘When we chat, it is no longer we who speak… we are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people, and not of a self that differs from them.’” “So when I talk to you,” Mahnmut said on their [...]
- Addendum to ‘Staying Critical in the Digital Age’
When I expressed frustration last week with VoCA’s early report from the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s digital criticism panel, I closed with a vague hope that fellow art critic and blogger Leah Sandals would be able to provide a more thorough picture of what, at first glance, seemed like utterly dismal goings-on between seemingly ill-equipped panelists. [...]
