The Easel

4th April 2023

An artist’s fantasy or the real world?

Sebastian Smee | Washington Post | 22nd March 2023

Even before Admiral Perry hove to in 1853, Japan’s middle class was growing. Mimicking the wealthy, they developed a taste for art, including titillating paintings of the pleasure district at the edge of Tokyo city. This “floating world” was, in truth, mostly imagined because Japanese society was not especially permissive. Most likely, these works offered an escape from the daily realities facing the middle classes – “the fixed world of social obligation and feudal hierarchy.”

28th March 2023

Gagosian’s DALL-E–Enabled Art Exhibition Throws Us Headfirst into the Uncanny Valley

Shanti Escalante-De Mattei | ARTnews | 24th March 2023

This writer hurries to shout ‘crisis’, mentioning it in her second sentence. Do image generating algorithms like DALL-E comprise a crisis? Beeple (remember him?) and crypto art emerged in 2021 and the sky hasn’t fallen in. Images from DALL-E are more sophisticated, but have we crossed a “digital Rubicon”?  Irrespective of any crisis, the idea of “authenticity” needs re-thinking. We already live in “an era of unreal-ness. Since when is “realness” [in art] a metric?”

The Many Dimensions of Murakami’s Mr. Pointy

Annie Morse | Art Institute of Chicago | 21st March 2023

Murakami’s superflat creations are all high gloss and “cartoon gaiety”. Is it serious art? The writer thinks so and references Murakami’s work, Mr Pointy. The figure’s pointy head, a connection to the celestial, is a reference to Buddha. It adopts a Shiva-like pose and is supported by a squat figure, the colour of which suggests both “galactic vastness and the detailing on a muscle car”. Under all that is a lotus blossom, an emblem of purity. Murakami, she says, deserves “repeated, close looking”.

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