Electric Apostasy: The Day Bob Dylan Died

For the 1950s’ generation, “the day the music died” was February 3, 1959—the day when the plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” crashed. For the 1960s generation, however, “the day the music died” was July 25, 1965—the day when Bob Dylan crashed the 1965 Newport Folk Festival stage with an electric guitar in front of him and rock band behind him to rip into a loud, raucous version of his new hit, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Bob Dylan the folk figure of the early ‘60s was dead. Bob Dylan the rock voice of the late ‘60s generation was born.  “For many people the story of Newport 1965 is simple,” author-musician Elijah Wald writes in Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties, “Bob Dylan was busy being born, and anyone who did not welcome the change was busy dying.” In Dylan Goes Electric, Wald tells an electrifying story of just how complex the true story of that moment was—a cultural crossroads now mired in mythology but even more fascinating and significant when told with clear eyes and an understanding of both sides of the divide Dylan stood across. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Electric Apostasy: The Day Bob Dylan Died."

Atomic Sublime: How Photography Shapes our View of Nuclear Warfare and Energy

The 70^th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will undoubtedly be accompanied by images of the “mushroom clouds” that rose over both cities. Terrible and sublime, these images burned themselves into the consciousness of “the greatest generation” and every generation since that’s lived with both the legacy of nuclear war and the reality of nuclear energy. A new exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, titled Camera Atomica, looks deeply at the interrelated nature of photography and nuclear war and peace to come away with a fascinating glimpse of the calculatedly manufactured “atomic sublime” — the fascination with such terrible power at our command that simply won’t let us look away. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Atomic Sublime: How Photography Shapes our View of Nuclear Warfare and Energy."

Vision Loss: The Forgotten German Prophets Secretly Behind Modern Art

 The forgotten aspects of art history will always be the most intriguing. Digging up the dead storylines of art history, whether in the distant or the recent past, will never end, mostly thanks to forces that buried the facts, if not the bodies, for whatever agenda. Artists and Prophets: A Secret History of Modern Art 1872-1972 at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt resurrects German visionaries and Jesus wannabes from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to look at how their exploits and artistic creations helped shape the course of German and European modern art. It also shines light on how the impact of those figures fell into obscurity as another casualty of the ideological war waged by that most unfortunately unforgettable of German messianic aspirants — Adolf Hitler. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Vision Loss: The Forgotten German Prophets Secretly Behind Modern Art."

Comebacks: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and the City of Detroit

Few American cultural institutions stared as deep into the yawning, austerity-driven abyss of large-scale deaccessioning as The Detroit Institute of Arts. When the City of Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013, vulturous creditors circled the DIA’s collection, estimated worth (depending on the estimator) of $400 million to over $800 million. Some experts see signs of a Detroit comeback, however, but one very visible sign is the new DIA exhibition Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, a showcase of the city’s ties to Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as well as a tribute to Kahlo’s and Rivera’s own artistic comebacks. Few exhibitions truly capture the spirit of a city at a critical moment in its history, but Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit is a show of comebacks that will have you coming back for more. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Comebacks: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and the City of Detroit."

JFK: The Opera?

Whereas European countries were once able to tap into their history for subjects for opera, America’s never succeeded in doing the same. That problem comes in part from the decline in opera as a popular, public art form, but also perhaps from the lack of operatically epic subjects to be found in American history. Now, composer David T. Little hopes to create a modern American opera with JFK, a 2-act, 2-hour opera focusing on the life of President John F. Kennedy, whose life and death became defining moments not only for the Baby Boom generation, but also, many would suggest, the hinge upon which all American history turns for the last half century. Set to premier in 2016, JFK as a work-in-progress already raises important questions about how opera (and art in general) can approach history. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "JFK: The Opera?"

Hearing (and Feeling) the Contemporary Art of Allora & Calzadilla

Imagine standing in a bare room in which a small, 4-billion-year-old rock hangs from the ceiling by a thin wire as three vocalists whistle and breathe on it to make it swing. For some people, such a scenario might be the nightmare version of contemporary art run amok, so far “out there” that it’s never coming back. However, standing there and watching the piece, titled Lifespan, part of the new exhibition Allora & Calzadilla: Intervals, I couldn’t help but find myself mentally urging the rock to move, as perhaps others in the crowd were, too. The art of collaborators Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla encourages this kind of chain-reaction collaboration by making you first hear the work and then feel it in your mind and body. For those who think contemporary art’s lost in space, Allora and Calzadilla bring it back to Earth. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Hearing (and Feeling) the Contemporary Art of Allora & Calzadilla."

The Fight for Images of Ferguson

The flood of images of violence and unrest continues to flow from Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014. (See one slide show here.) The promise of a “post-racial America” after the election of the first African-American President seems a cruel joke when watching scenes of mostly African-American citizens square off against mostly white police and government representatives. But aside from the story that these images tell is the story of the images themselves. According to The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), “Press freedom in the United States dramatically deteriorated in 2013.” A major part of that curtailed press freedom involves the primary medium of today’s information society—visual images. From arresting and threatening photojournalists to performance art specifically about picturing dead young, African-American men, the fight for images of Ferguson reveals more than we realize and more than many people want to acknowledge. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Fight for Images of Ferguson."

Are Liberals Killing Art?

In his recent New Republic article titled “Liberals Are Killing Art: How the Left became obsessed with ideology over beauty,” art critic Jed Perl makes a convoluted argument that liberalism now “find[s] the emotions unleashed by the arts—I mean all of the arts, from poetry to painting to dance—something of an embarrassment.” Embarrassed by emotions, liberals “who support a rational public policy—a social safety net, consistency and efficiency in foreign affairs, steps to reverse global warming—[are] reluctant to embrace art’s celebration of unfettered metaphor and mystery and magic.” Beginning with that quick hop, skip, and rhetorical leap from global warming to art appreciation, Perl stands up a series of liberal straw men to knock down in his overall accusation that liberals see art just as political (or politicizable) content at the expense of aesthetic pleasure. In resurrecting an old school argument from more than half a century ago, Perl asks if liberals are killing art, but ends up making readers ask if conservative critics are killing art instead. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Are Liberals Killing Art?"

How Picasso Mythologized Love and War

After a trip to Italy in February 1917, Pablo Ruiz y Picasso decided to go back to basics in his art. Like so many other artists and pretty much the entire world, Picasso wanted to leave behind the Cubist style matching the modernist discord of World War I for a neoclassicm that emulated the harmonious artistry of the Ancient Romans and Greeks. Despite this turn towards the past, Picasso’s private and public present continually intruded, resulting in a mythologizing of his loves and wars. In the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new exhibition Picasso Prints: Myths, Minotaurs, and Muses, we see Picasso refashion ancient myths into personal alter egos from the 1920s through the 1950s as a way of dealing with events in his convoluted love life as well as the convoluted politics of his native Spain, specifically in the masterpiece of Guernica. In choosing the Minotaur—a figure simultaneously of great violence and great sexual energy—as his avatar, Picasso reinvented the game of classical symbolism and forged a modern mode for mythology. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Picasso Mythologized Love and War."

An Exhibition About an Art Critic?

Nobody goes to a baseball game to watch the umpires, so why would someone go to a museum to see an exhibition dedicated to an art critic—one of those arbiters of taste who hopes to mediate but sometimes only muddles the interaction between artists and the public? England’s Tate Britain bets that the British public will come to watch the umpire in their new exhibition Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation. Not just your average umpire, Sir Kenneth Clark (shown above) ruled over art criticism for decades, stretching from his becoming Director of the British National Gallery in 1933 at just 30 years of age all the way to his crowning achievement with the 13-part documentary Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark in 1969. Although the main focus of the show is on Clark’s work in the 1930s and 1940s, by having the show’s title hark back to his highly personal broadcast of what was civilization and art, it raises the larger question of how this public servant served the public for well-intentioned good and possibly ill, as any critic can. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "An Exhibition About an Art Critic?"

Kara Walker’s Sweet, Not So Subtle Revenge on Big Sugar

If you know the sexually and racially charged art of Kara Walker, you know one thing—she’s not subtle. Walker’s artistic oeuvre to date makes the title of her newest work, which is also her first large-scale public project, all the funnier—A Subtlety. Subtitled the Marvelous Sugar Baby for the 35-foot-high, 75-foot-long, sugar sphinx “Mammy” (shown above) at the heart of the exhibition, Walker’s “subtlety” show both alludes to the absurdly elaborate desserts (also known as “entremets”) the nobility of the past would stage for their guests as well as the subtle, unseen ways that the sugar we use to sweeten our lives still comes as the cost of the embitterment of lives of those living in third world countries. Adding to the symbolism, A Subtlety appears in the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY, which was once the largest sugar refinery in the United States but which is now destined for the wrecking ball. In what might be the most significant (if not the physically largest) artistic statement of the year, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety enacts sweet, not so subtle revenge on big sugar of yesterday and calls us to examine the cruelty mixed into every sweet spoonful today. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Kara Walker’s Sweet, Not So Subtle Revenge on Big Sugar."

How Making Art Can Rebuild Broken Communities

"The broken places are my canvases,” Artist Lily Yeh says in the documentary The Barefoot Artist. “People’s stories are my pigments. People’s talents and imaginations are the instruments. I began to find my voice.” Since the 1980s, Yeh has taken her talents to places around the world broken by poverty or war and rebuilt those communities through the making of communal art. Through what eventually grew into the organization Barefoot Artists, Yeh “breathe[s] life, beauty, rhythm, and joy into th[ose] space[s]” that “beckon” to her as the “forgotten” homes of “traumatized people.” The directing team of Glenn Holsten and Daniel Traub (who is also Yeh’s son) have followed Yeh’s work since 1988 and provide an inspiring film that is sometimes painful in its honesty but always as hopeful as Yeh’s unyielding faith in the power of art to restore the individual spirit and rebuild shattered communities. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Making Art Can Rebuild Broken Communities."

Stephen Colbert and the End of "Stephen Colbert"

On October 17^th, 2005, comedian Stephen Colbert introduced the persona “Stephen Colbert” on the first episode of The Colbert Report by also introducing to the world the concept of “Truthiness.” That bit (the full video’s here) not only resulted in “truthiness” becoming Merriam-Webster’s 2006 Word of the Year, but also introduced the “truthiness” of performance art to a mainstream American audience. What began as a broad caricature of a Bill O’Reilly-esque conservative TV pundit evolved over 9 years into a multidimensional character with elements of the real wit, charm, warmth, and unyielding mental sharpness of the real man. With news that Colbert will be leaving The Colbert Report at the end of 2014 to replace David Letterman as the host of the Late Show on CBS in 2015 comes great sadness on seeing “Stephen Colbert” the character come to an end, but we’ll still have the rest of the year to celebrate, appreciate, and understand what Stephen Colbert the performance artist truly accomplished. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Stephen Colbert and the End of 'Stephen Colbert.'"

Documenting China’s Fake Case Against Ai Weiwei

“You criticize them too much. If this was 1957 they would have killed you already,” Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s worried mother tells him in a new documentary titled Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case, which documents the Chinese government’s fabricated charges of tax evasion against the Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd, a business registered not in his but in his wife’s name, although the charges are leveled against Ai. “It’s a fake case,” Ai explains.  “It’s a fake case about a Fake Company.  But the Fake Company is a real company and the fake case is a real case, but it’s fake, it’s fabricated.” In this up-is-down world, Danish filmmaker Andreas Johnsen captures the very real day-to-day dangers the artist and those close to him face from a Chinese government that fears Ai’s online influence with a young generation of plugged-in Chinese capable of considering widespread cultural change. More than any documentary on Ai Weiwei so far, Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case depicts accurately what it is to be an artist struggling bravely against political oppression and the personal cost of that fight. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Documenting China’s Fake Case Against Ai Weiwei."

Why Does George W. Bush Paint (and Why Do We Look)?

When former President George W. Bush’s self-portraits in the shower and tub slipped into public sight a year ago, the general critical approaches either commented on the amateur quality of the work, on the obvious symbolism of cleansing (if you were a critic and thought he had something to cleanse himself of), or on both. Bush allegedly took up painting less than a year before the revelations, making him the most viewed
art rookie of modern times. Now, in a new exhibition at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum titled The Art of Leadership: A President’s Personal Diplomacy, Bush puts his artwork out there for comment on his own terms. The art’s still amateurish, but the content—portraits of “41” and “43,” as the Bushes refer to themselves, as well as other world leaders—cries out for commentary beyond the brushwork. Why “W.” paints remains a bit of a mystery that he hasn’t fully cleared up. But why we look says as much about his legacy as it does about our continuing struggle to come to grips with it. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Why Does George W. Bush Paint (and Why Do We Look)?"

The Sad, Strange History of “Degenerate Art”

“Crazy at any price!” read a sign above the modern art masterpieces at the Nazi-sponsored Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art,” in English) exhibition in Munich, Germany, in 1937. The fevered brainchild of art-obsessed Adolf Hitler, Entartete Kunst aimed at showing not only what “Jewish” and “Bolshevik” art looked like, but also arguing how the degeneracy of those artists and their work threatened the spiritual health of the German people, the “master race” Hitler believed would rule the world, with him as their leader. The Neue Galerie in New York City revisits that sad moment in modern art history with the exhibition Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937, which runs through June 30, 2014. The exhibition gathers together many of the “crazy” works labeled as degenerate, holds them up against examples of the Hitler-approved German art, and takes us down the long, strange road that led up to that Munich show. The result is a sad, strange history that will leave you shaking your head at the past, but will also make you wonder if it could happen, again, here and now. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Sad, Strange History of 'Degenerate Art.'"

Have We Finally Found the Voice of the American Soldier of the Iraqi and Afghan Wars?

After wars end and soldiers come home, it usually takes a while for the war to “come home” to the consciousness of the American people at large. When did the reality of Vietnam really enter the American imagination: in 1975, with the Fall of Saigon, or in 1978, with the film Coming Home? This detachment’s increased as a slimmer and slimmer slice of the demographic learns the lessons of combat life first, second, or even third hand. As veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wars come home and try to find their place in America again, we still haven’t had that Coming Home moment artistically. Phil Klay’s Redeployment, a collection of twelve short stories by a former Marine who served in Iraq, may finally give the Iraq/Afghan vet a voice to be heard by the American imagination. With a brutally realistic eye yet a tender humanism fighting to survive, Klay’s fiction finally allows the American public to hear the voice of the veterans who don’t want or need your praise for their service, but rather long for your attention, understanding, and compassion. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Have We Finally Found the Voice of the American Soldier of the Iraqi and Afghan Wars?"

Italian Futurism: The Undead Art Movement?

When people say that an art movement or school “died out,” they usually don’t mean it literally. In the case of the Italian Futurists, however, you can specify the day the movement “died”—August 17, 1916, the day that artist Umberto Boccioni succumbed to injuries at the age of 33 after falling from a horse and getting trampled during Italian Army cavalry training for World War I. Boccioni exemplified the best parts of an art movement that celebrated modern technology aesthetically. His death registers today as another senseless death among millions during the “Great War.” In a different sense, however, Italian Futurism “lived on” for another three decades and one more world war in the person of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the movement’s chief manifesto maker and warmonger. The Guggenheim Museum’s new exhibition Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, which runs through September 1, 2014, resurrects the good, the bad, and the ugly truths of an art movement that died in the culture and wars of the past yet still lives on, zombie-like, in our modern ones. How did Italian Futurism become the undead art movement? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Italian Futurism: The Undead Art Movement?"

Richard Hamilton: The True King of Pop?

Michael Jackson proudly wore the crown as the “King of Pop” until his death in 2009. In the visual arts, at least for Americans, Andy Warhol’s ruled as the “King of Pop,” reigning as the prime example of Pop Art for the uninitiated as well as for connoisseurs. Most British (and more than a few American) art lovers, however, see Richard Hamilton as the true “King of Pop” and Warhol as just an upstart usurper to the throne. The Tate Modern’s new exhibition Richard Hamilton, which runs through May 26, 2014, provides not only a
survey of Hamilton’s greatest pop hits, but also a career-long survey that shows how he engaged with popular culture beyond just Warhol-esque celebrity and marketing gestures and got at the heart of what Pop Art should  and could be. Is Richard Hamilton the true “King of Pop”? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Richard Hamilton: The True King of Pop?"

Can the Monuments Men Save the Art History Major?

During his recent State of the Union Address, President Obama went for a cheap laugh line by questioning the value of an art history degree. Although he later half apologized, Obama stuck by the well-worn argument that if something doesn’t have immediate economic value, then it has no value at all. The President’s timing seems poor considering the recent release of George Clooney’s new film, The Monuments Men, which tells the story of how some members of “The Greatest Generation” were not only also art history majors, but also contributed to the preservation and restoration of civilization after World War II. That State of the Union joke reminds us that the battle for the humanities’ place in society goes on. The Monuments Men saved Europe’s art treasures from the hands of Hitler, but can they save today’s art history major from irrelevance? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Can the Monuments Men Save the Art History Major?"