Two environmental activists superglued their hands to Botticelli's Primavera in the Uffizi Gallery last week, AP reports. A museum security guard wasted no time in reacting. In a "refreshing, no-nonsense approach to eco-warriors," according to The Daily Mail, the guard tore the protesters' hands from the painting...
The sentimental person thinks things will last; the romantic person has a desperate confidence they won't. — F. Scott Fitzgerald "High culture is paranoid about sentiment," the late painter Thomas Kinkade once said. The undisputed "king of kitsch," he often compared his art to Walt Disney's. "My paintings beckon you...
The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handle. — Bob Dylan Just in time for the 60th anniversary of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues"—which enshrined a vandalized pump within America's literary canon—an unknown artist in Denmark has vandalized a painting by one of nation's most...
We live in a political world. — Bob Dylan The notion behind this post came to me a week ago, but I felt no urgency to pursue the idea until late last evening, when POLITICO announced that the Supreme Court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade. My...
I'm ready to pack off to Ireland, home of my ancestors. Ireland's government has announced it will begin to pay 2,000 Irish artists $355 a week under a new universal basic income (UBI) program. There are no restrictions on how artists may spend the money. I'm guessing Guinness...
Like the members a '60s reunion band, 50 protestors gathered in Manhattan's Columbus Square last week for the "Ruins of Modernity Tour." The event—meant to be a raucous gallery tour at the Museum of Modern Art—was the fourth of 10 planned protests against MoMA, whose donors...
Whatever the objects of his attention, the painter will not make them say what they are without thereby learning what he is. — Jean-Paul Sartre Just when I think I've about had it with party strife, microbes, blizzards, intolerance and inequality, painting comes along to pick me up. Still-life...
Crime, money, power, drugs—are all linked. — Matthew Vaughn Community activists in Los Angeles, peeved with the proliferation of art galleries in the once-poor Boyle Heights neighborhood, charged local developers four years ago with a sleight-of-hand they named artwashing, the first known use of the word. Disingenuous businessmen,...
Today I give thanks for our First Amendment and freedom of expression. Throughout history, artists have been muzzled, shackled, imprisoned and liquidated merely for expressing "unofficial" ideas; but only once, thank the Lord, in the good-old USA. In Havana this moment, 14 artists are sequestered in an...