The Easel

17th December 2024

HOLIDAYS

year’s most popular stories among Easel subscribers. After that, your long-suffering editor, who has been in book writing purdah for much of 2024, needs a break. The Easel will resume on Tuesday January 28, 2025.

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How Digital Fabrication Changed Sculpture

Glenn Adamson | Art in America | 16th December 2024

An interesting discussion that, in some ways, gets its key points backwards. Computer-based design (notably AI) and production techniques are expanding sculpture’s possibilities for artists both rich and poor. In some cases, the creative contribution of the sculptor versus computer software is tangled, putting “artist and the machine … together in the black box”. At the start of the article, however, the shoe drops. “Impossible objects” are great but if they are not obviously human, they are not so interesting.

On Kawara, serial dater

Rowland Bagnall | Apollo | 5th December 2024

At the time of his death, Kawara would have put his age at 29,771 days. On quite a few of those days he made a text painting of the date. For over 30 years, he also sent occasional telegrams to friends saying “I am still alive”. And then there were the eleven years of daily postcards declaring “I got up”. Kawara was obsessed with the passing of time and “the slow ebbing away of life”. Differences in his “date” paintings are only minor but enough to remind us of the question “what are the traces we leave behind”?

Versailles: Science and Splendour, Science Museum: A masterclass in storytelling

Alastair Sooke | Yahoo news | 13th December 2024

Can a science exhibition be an exhibition of art?  France’s Louis XIV, the Sun King, surrounded himself with various scientific instruments that advertised his erudition and power, But are they any more than “vapid opulence”? Still, if not every item is artistic, at least the exhibition can boast the fabulous Breguet watch 160, made for Marie Antionette. With its intricate engineering and elaborate case, it is the ultimate combination of science and the decorative arts.

Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome at the National Gallery

James White | The Upcoming | 4th December 2024

When the Renaissance artists got bored with scientifically accurate perspective and proportion, they came up with mannerism – a “flaunting of style and distortion”. Parmigianino went all in on this and, at the tender age of 23, produced one of the style’s masterpieces. Hanging in London, it was regarded as a “mustardy-yellow monstrosity” until a 10 year restoration. Now, says one writer it is “one of the UK’s most mesmerising works of Renaissance art.”

Peter Schjeldahl’s Pleasure Principle

Zachary Fne | The Nation | 9th December 2024

Schjeldahl, a smoker, greeted his lung cancer diagnosis with the pithy comment “no surprise”. He wrote for a few more years, dispensing his “chatty authority”. His death marked the end of a whole approach to writing about art. Art, he said, was “a holiday of the spirit”. In his role as a critic, he “doted” on his readership and felt “somebody [shouldn’t] have to crawl over broken glass to get to art.” The role of the critic, in his view, was to be “an instrument for nudging you closer to an artwork.”

10 artworks that stole the show at L.A. museums in 2024

Christopher Knight | LA Times | 9th December 2024

What is there to learn from one critic’s list of hits from 2024? Not a lot perhaps, apart from highlighting some new names. On further inspection, though, the list is a reasonable summary of art world preoccupations. Identity is prominent (no surprise). Assertive, confident work by women artists is another. Technology, Indigenous art and Renaissance art all make an appearance. An equally arbitrary list of the “best” art shows in NY places its bets similarly.

10th December 2024

What the Notre Dame Restoration Says About France’s Past and its Future

Bradley Stephens | Design Art Magazine | 7th December 2024

Notre Dame cathedral’s restoration is “miraculous”. Luckily, key elements of the building survived the fire and a prior digital image facilitated restoration of this 19th century “reimagining of medievalism”. While traditionalists and modernisers battle over even small modernising details, workers have taken an “almost devotional” approach to the project.  One historian ascribes that to the building’s cultural status. Notre Dame is “not the most beautiful of our cathedrals. But it is the most admired”.

Tomas van Houtryve: ‘Photographing Notre Dame became an obsession’

Michael Naulin | Blind | 7th December 2024

Notre Dame was derelict until Victor Hugo, writing in the 1830’s, extolled its symbolic value. Thus rescued, it acquired a uniquely Parisian identity, something apparent to Houtryve as he documented the rebuild. “I felt the mystery of the building. For Victor Hugo, Gothic architecture was the pinnacle of public storytelling … every stone told a story. Like its builders and restorers, [my images] are part of a story of transmission … an intergenerational project.” His photo-essay for National Geographic is here.

Stop Hating on Pantone’s “Mocha Mousse” Color of the Year

Rhea Nayyar | Hyperallergic | 5th December 2024

Colour can be a serious topic but “colour of the year” – well, not so much. Pantone, the colour technology company, positions its 2025 colour, Mocha Mousse, thus: “it expresses a thoughtful indulgence … an unpretentious classic”. Keeping a straight face, an architecture publication promises that the colour “as an amuse-bouche accent wall [will] add a pop of sophisticated vibrancy”. Wow! The above writer, though, is on a different thought track.  Why do so many people look at brown and “liken it to poop”?

Art Institute of Chicago opens its first gallery devoted solely to Korean art

Stefano Esposito | Chicago Sun-Times | 5th November 2024

When Samsung’s chairman died in 2020 his “vast” art collection was donated to the nation. That donation, in part, has fuelled loans to a new Korean gallery in Chicago. Its opening show includes contemporary works, but the “showstoppers” are older pieces dating back to the 5th century BCE (discussed here). Besides Buddhist art, the ceramic works show the transition from earthy “buncheong” stoneware to Goryoe celadon and, later, refined white porcelain. Move over K-pop!

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Tate Modern review – an exhaustive and exhausting show

Sarah Kent | the arts desk | 2nd December 2024

From the 1950’s artists viewed technology as a new frontier. Some work is “poignant”, with wobbly machines being “like metaphors for life”. Our growing understanding of perception paralleled the emergence of op art. Computers, though, have complicated things. When used to aid (imperfect) human creativity, they are fine but attempts at autonomous creativity fall flat. “When a machine takes control … the results become less interesting.  I left the exhibition feeling profoundly depressed.”

Total eclipse of the art?

Sibyl Ruth | The Critic | 6th December 2024

Should art ever be destroyed? This catchy question is not directed at woeful art (go ahead and throw it away) but more at the politicisation of good art. Politicisation is sometimes the handiwork of “iconoclastic experts” – woke curators – whose wall label texts are explicitly political. Then there are protests that take advantage of renowned (but apolitical) artworks. One writer suggests we show less “pious reverence” toward art. “Occasional destruction is the price we pay for art doing its job.”

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