A Beautiful Mind: Agnes Martin, Minimalism, and the Feminist Voice

“When I think of art, I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life,” minimalist artist Agnes Martin once explained. “It is not in the eye; it is in my mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.” In the first comprehensive survey of her art at the Tate Modern, in London, England, the exhibition Agnes Martin strives to guide viewers to that “awareness of perfection” Martin strove to embody in her minimalist, geometrically founded art. Rather than the cold, person-less brand of modernist minimalism, Martin’s work personifies the warm humanity of Buddhist editing down to essentials. At the same time, surveying Martin’s art and thinking allows us to revisit the feminist critiques of minimalism and shows how Martin’s stepping back from the bustle of the New York art scene freed her to find “a beautiful mind” — not just for women, but for everyone. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "A Beautiful Mind: Agnes Martin, Minimalism, and the Feminist Voice."

Can a Classic Museum Really Be Made Modern?

Every new cultural institution hopes for “The Bilbao Effect”—the economic boom the faltering, former industrial city of Bilbao, Spain, enjoyed after the 1997 rise of architect Frank Gehry’s game-changing design for the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum. But even old cultural institutions want some of that same magic. So, when Gehry came to see Barnett Newman’s The Stations of the Cross with artist friend Ellsworth Kelly at the Philadelphia Museum of Art back in 2006, the museum’s then director and CEO, Anne d’Harnoncourt, approached Gehry about “doing something special” there, too. However, instead of a new signature “Gehry” look, d’Harnoncourt requested “a quiet intervention”—an underground “Philadelphia Effect.” In Making a Classic Modern: Frank Gehry’s Master Plan for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the PMA finally unveils their “master plan” for revitalizing their classic main building first opened in 1928 for the 21^st century. The big question hanging over this whole decade-long, estimated half billion dollar project remains: can a classic museum really be made modern? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Can a Classic Museum Really Be Made Modern?"

Can a Museum Rewrite Art History?

Ask me to build a Mount Rushmore of Abstract Expressionism, and I’ll put the faces of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman up there. From Hollywood movies to MoMA retrospectives to award-winning dramas, those figures stand in the popular imagination as the first rank of their generation. A newly opened museum hopes to carve a niche for another face in that pantheon—Clyfford Still. The Clyfford Still Museum, which opened on November 18^th in Denver, Colorado, exists specifically to push Still over the top and undo decades of neglect of his art. The story behind that neglect—a self-imposed isolation—is also the story behind this hoped-for resurrection. Can The Clyfford Still Museum rewrite half a century of American art history? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Can a Museum Rewrite Art History?"

[Image: Clyfford Still. 1957-J No. 2 (PH-401), 1957. Oil on canvas, 113 x 155 in. Clyfford Still Museum Collection. © Clyfford Still Estate. Photo: Peter Harholdt.]

[Many thanks to The Clyfford Still Museum for providing me with the image above and other press materials related to their grand opening.]

Taking Aim: Rhetoric of the Gun in Images and Words

On a day filled with tragic images of the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others, it seems absurd to blog about anything else. As advertised, this is a blog about how “looking at art leads to thinking about life,” but today I’m interested in how looking at certain images (and the words that accompany them) lead to thinking about death, specifically death delivered from the barrel of a gun. For all those who proclaim a constitutional right to bear arms, I’ll counter with a 9-year-old girl’s constitutional right to know what it’s like to be 10, something one of today’s victims will never experience. Yes, guns don’t kill people—crazy people with too easy access to guns kill people, sometimes under the influence of visual and verbal propaganda that makes light of taking aim on a human being while knowing full well that someone may take it serious, deadly serious. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Taking Aim."

Special Forces: Is Specialization Killing Art Today?

The 18^th century French Neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres played the violin well enough to hold his own with “Sold His Soul to the Devil” good musicians such as Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt. Ingres took that intimate knowledge of music to add a different kind of beauty to works such as The Turkish Bath (from 1862; shown above). That little piece of trivia came to mind as I read an interview with The Moderna Museet’s new director, Daniel Birnbaum, in the October 2010 issue of The Art Newspaper. “Specialization is a problem of our time,” Birnbaum complained in response to a question regarding his interest in literature and philosophy as well as art. “There are many artists who work in different fields. A big museum such as the Moderna can tear down the walls between art and literature, for example, and I want to try such things.” What is the cost of specialization today, when art schools prepare artists who may know the techniques of their discipline but little else? How do we get back to the “good old days” of Ingres? Have artists today sold their souls to art schools at the risk of never being “true” artists? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Special Forces."