Could Someone Die Over This Painting?

Art isn’t usually a life or death matter, but the controversy over South African artist Brett Murray’s The Spear (detail shown above) might end in bloodshed. When Murray decided to paint South African President Jacob Zuma along the lines of a famous poster of Lenin, but with the added detail of prominent genitalia, he knew he was courting controversy but may not have realized just how heated (and dangerous) the debate would get. Now that the painting has been vandalized, it’s natural to ask if that violence might extend to the artist or to those who support his right to free expression. Could someone die over this painting? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Could Someone Die Over This Painting?"

[Image: Brett Murray. The Spear (detail), 2012.]

How Rosalind Krauss Turned Her Aneurysm into Art Criticism

“Late in 1999, my brain erupted,” begins influential modern art critic Rosalind E. Krauss’ newest book, Under Blue Cup. Struck by an aneurysm (an example artfully rendered above), Krauss fell into a coma for a month, only to resurface and find that pieces of her remarkable memory had washed away in the torrents of blood. During her recovery, Krauss used flash cards as tools to reestablish her memory, one of which had the legend, “Under blue cup.” Under Blue Cup becomes a book-length “flash card” in which Krauss strives to help contemporary art restore its own, pre-Duchampian memory of the specific medium being as important to art as the idea itself. When “the aneurysm thrust forgetting into my experience as a possibility I’d never imagined,” Krauss writes, she realized the legacy of modern art’s forgetting and its unimaginable trajectory towards irrelevance. Under Blue Cup is a deeply personal, deeply infuriating, deeply thought, and deeply felt prescription for what Krauss sees as the ills of today’s art world. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Rosalind Krauss Turned Her Aneurysm into Art Criticism."

[Many thanks to The MIT Press for providing me with a review copy of Rosalind E. Krauss’ Under Blue Cup.]