Blog
Bob Dylan as a visual artist
Long before Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature this year, pundits used to talk about “Dylan versus Keats”, as if you had to choose, and as if Dylan’s poetic transformations of folk song are really so different from what John Keats does in his eerie ballad La […]
Artemisia Gentileschi, the hero of her own life
Two women are holding a man down on a bed. One presses her first against his head, so he can’t raise it from the mattress, while her companion pins his torso in place. They are well-built with powerful arms but even so it takes their combined strength to keep their […]
The nocturnal in art
The nights are drawing in. Autumn evenings are getting duskier, mistier, and cooler. Early mornings are darker. Soon we’ll be living large parts of our lives under a nocturnal cloak. As the dark deepens it unleashes imagination and stories of ghosts and witches; dreams and nightmares populate the night. Autumn […]
A century of Dada
A century ago the world was two years into an apocalyptic war: and 1916 saw it turn more murderous yet with the Battle of the Somme, killing almost 20,000 British soldiers on its first day alone. That same year a group of mostly German pacifists in exile in neutral Switzerland […]
Artists against Brexit
Recently (on Sunday 8 May 2016), Sean O’Hagan interviewed Wolfgang Tillmans in The Guardian. We reproduce some question and answers of this exciting interview. Enjoy! You have designed 25 posters against Brexit. What prompted you, as an artist, to make this high-profile, pro-European statement? First, it is a much more […]
Nordic stupidity and Chinese censorship
Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei says Danish toymaker Lego has refused his studio’s request for a bulk order of the plastic toys on political grounds. In an Instagram post on Friday 28th October evening, the artist said Lego had refused the bulk order in September, quoting the company as saying […]
Sargent and/in Boston
In the spring of 1925, the famed painter John Singer Sargent was preparing to travel from London to Boston. His plan? To oversee the final installation of murals he’d created for the Museum of Fine Arts — mythic works that would join similar paintings at the Boston Public Library and […]
The art fair-based model, the artists and the audiences
One of the main problems of this new art fair-based market model is that, with many galleries closing, fewer emerging artists are able to have their work displayed. And it is hard for emerging artists to infiltrate established art fairs, especially as the smaller galleries that represent these artists have […]
The current concept of an ‘artist’
Artist is a descriptive term applied to a person who engages in an activity deemed to be an art. An artist also may be defined unofficially as “a person who expresses himself- or herself through a medium”. The word is also used in a qualitative sense of, a person creative […]
What is an artist?
What is an artist? Are there different concepts after this word? Do the different disciplines in the artistic creativity, produce different types of artists? Is it possible to establish a categorization of artists, and a categorization for different types of creativity? Some answers could be very different and, perhaps, clearly […]