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Art is good for the soul, but sometimes it can be bad for your health. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds installation at the Tate Modern in London aroused curiosity before it began affecting visitors’ respiratory systems with the porcelain dust it threw off. Sadly, this is just the latest hazardous episode in the nine-year history of the Tate Modern’s “The Unilever Series” program of featuring installation art by the hottest contemporary artists. But are these blockbuster shows pushing the envelope beyond the limits of public safety? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Seeds of Destruction."
Until she was 10 years old, performance artist Marina Abramović believed her parents when they told her that her birthday was November 29th, “Republic Day” in her native Yugoslavia. They moved the date from the actual November 30th to link her birth with the fortunes of her country, which both her parents fought to make free during World War II. Years later, she met her long-time life and artistic partner Ulay on her birthday, only to find that November 30th was his birthday, too. “Now, rather than a date to be ignored as a depressing annual reminder of lost time and inevitable oblivion,” James Westcott writes in When Marina Abramović Dies: A Biography, the first biography of the artist, “November 30 quickly became a cosmic guarantee of a shared destiny and a symbiotic union.” Just as her birthdate took on “cosmic” significance, Abramović’s flirtations with death and suffering take on greater meaning through her performance art. Westcott guides us through the maze of meaning Abramović weaves and helps us come through to the other side where death oddly gives birth to a whole new kind of life on this earth, if not necessarily the next. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Birthday Girl."
[Many thanks to MIT Press for providing me with a review copy of James Westcott’s When Marina Abramović Dies: A Biography.]
Scrolling through the 2010 Power 100 of Art Review, I almost immediately had two reactions. First, I’m not on it! (Bloggers get little to no respect.) Second, so many of the artists (and only 18 of the 100 are artists) are either unfamiliar to me or, maybe worse, too familiar. Any list is suspect purely by nature. The makers of this list claim that it’s “[f]irst and foremost,… a guide to the general trends, networks and forces that shape the artworld.” What such lists really provide is something for people like me to talk about. What I find myself talking about is the way the list reflects the true source of power—in the hands of gallerists, curators, and art fair directors and, disturbingly so, not in the hands of artists or critics. What does that power surge to those who aren’t creating or critiquing mean for art today? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Power Surge."
In 1886, shortly after his dismissal as director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in a cloud of scandal, Thomas Eakins changed the title of his 1880 painting Crucifixion (shown above) to Ecce Homo, “Behold the Man,” the words Pilate used to announce Christ to the public that would call for his execution. In the eyes of Akela Reason in her Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History, the change represents how Eakins viewed and used history to his own ends. “Eakins’s new title not only reinforced the corporeal presence of the subject but also pointedly alluded to the injustice of Christ’s execution at the hands of an unruly mob,” Reason writes, “a situation that he may have believed, perhaps even unconsciously, paralleled his own.” According to Reason, Eakins used history to his own ends, stretching and altering it to support his view of the study of the human form as the centerpiece of all art—a humanism that touched not only upon religion, but also upon who would rise to the pantheon of art history, a goal Eakins never gave up even at his lowest moments. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Behold the Man."
[Many thanks to the University of Pennsylvania Press for providing me with a review copy of Akela Reason’s Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History.]
