Copycat: Damien Hirst, Plagiarist?

When you compile a list of artists that other artists love to hate, a few names typically appear: Jeff Koons, Thomas Kinkade, and, perhaps most virulently, Damien Hirst. You can call it jealousy over their financial success, or you can call it disdain for the artwork that brings those riches home, but people in the art world just can’t stand those three. Koons offends with his kitschy pieces relentlessly marketed. Kinkaide draws ire with the cloying pseudo-religiosity of his calendar- and greeting card-ready landscapes. But Hirst twists artists’ knickers by rolling in the dollars with work that repeatedly echoes, to put it kindly, the art of lesser-known artists. A recent article in The Guardian outlined the most recent claims of plagiarism against Hirst. Hirst refuses to comment, but many believe his silence is the meek meow of a copycat. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Copycat."

The Mind’s Eye: Freud and Photography

When we think of Sigmund Freud, we think first of words—the “talking cure” of psychoanalysis, books such as The Interpretation of Dreams, and the infamous Freudian slip. In Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art, Mary Bergstein, Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design, suggests we should instead think of pictures, specifically photography. “[P]hotography penetrated the cognitive style of Freud and his contemporaries,” Bergstein asserts in decidedly Freudian language, and “documentary photography—of art and archaeology, but also of medicine, science, and ethnography—influenced the formation of Freudian psychoanalysis.” Photography, with its fragmentary and evocative elements, mirrors the way human memory works for Freud. Thus, the mind’s eye, both conscious and subconscious, mimics the photographic lens. Mirrors of Memory provides a new lens through which to view Freud’s development within the early development of photography and the visual culture we now live in. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Mind's Eye."

[Many thanks to Cornell University Press for providing me with a review copy of Mary Bergstein’s Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art.]

Mission: Impossible: The Art of McSweeney’s

“Impossible, you say?” one of the early pages asks rhetorically in Art of McSweeney’s, a study of the art of the quirky periodical McSweeney’s Quarterly. “Nothing is impossible when you work for the circus.” With David Eggers as the chief ringmaster, McSweeney’s Quarterly gathers together all creative creatures under the big top of his publishing venture in an attempt to do nothing less than save the printed book itself. To lovers of the online reading experience, Eggers et al. seem like hopeless Luddites—dinosaurs in a golden age of pixels. To lovers of the book as a work of art, the McSweeney’s cast attempts the impossible and succeeds, at least for now. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Mission: Impossible."

[Many thanks to Chronicle Books for providing me with a review copy of Art of McSweeney’s.]