A key idea behind Pop art was to depict everyday reality, unprettified. Having hung around Warhol’s ‘factory’ in New York it was natural that Shore would bring this radical aesthetic into his photography. He helped create a “new photographic vernacular: a flat, deadpan aesthetic that thrives on the deliberate blandness of its subject matter and a rejection of artistic conventions.”
After Spain’s colonization of Mexico, the Church acquired great wealth. Paintings were one way for it (and an emerging local elite) to promote itself. And it did – thus supporting a vibrant local artistic community. A first ever survey of this late Baroque art is “spellbinding. [It is] an extraordinary artistic era just coming into focus … and the show a remarkable curatorial achievement, one of the most memorable exhibitions of the year.”
Balthus had a thing about adolescent girls. Amid the furor about sexual abuse and #MeToo, should New York’s Met comply with a petition and take down an apparently lascivious work? Definitely not, according to this writer. Art is full of sexual imagery. “The danger in the wings is a new Puritanism … The challenge now is to define codes of behavior without throwing out the maps that got us to the place we are now.”
The Incas believed jade and turquoise were sacred and thus valued these materials highly. Gold was pretty but not that special. “[F]inely woven tapestry garments and feather works were among the most labor-intensive and highly prized luxury objects of all.” Sadly, the Spanish conquistadors had very different ideas about value.
Andrew Wyeth is the itch that critics just can’t help but scratch. James Panero is the latest to join the doubters’ ranks. Wyeth loved action movies and brought to his painting “a dreamy brand of realism. A coastal [elitist] who romanticized but also valorized the struggles of the overlooked … his compelling images still offer up a voyeuristic escape, all with the timeless stamp of inauthenticity.”