Posted on 08/28/2019 5:47:41 AM PDT by NOBO2012
After all my well-founded rants against the Wall Street Journal I find myself tempted to renew my expiring subscription after all. How else will I be able to stay on top of important art world news like this: New Game Plan for a Smithsonian Showcase.
When Melissa Chiu was hired to run the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., five years ago, she took a hard look at its collection and found the holdings were strong in modern sculptors like Henry Moore but weak in works by women and anyone living outside the U.S. or Europe…
You certainly wouldn’t want an American museum to to be accused of being patriarchally Western-centric so the Hirshhorn Museum has launched a drive to expand its works by women and artists outside the U.S. and Europe. American artists are not excluded, as long as they are female. For example, this Katherine Bernhardt piece was recently acquired for the museum: ‘Toilet paper and cigarettes black and pink.’
That particular piece of inspiration is going to be a game changer for somebody, somewhere. Ms. Bernhardt also has a series of pink panther cartoon inspired art pieces for sale, not yet acquired by the Hirshhorn, as far as I know.
Pink Panther + a Cigarette, 2016 Acrylic and spray paint on canvas
What makes this cartoon art transformational?
Nike Panther, Katherine Bernhardt
I don’t know, maybe gallery representation? Or possibly endorsements from big companies like Nike? Swoop, swoop! Whatever it is, the new Hirshorn’s director knows it when she sees it.
Ms. Chiu said she likes the absurdity of Ms. Bernhardt’s everyday vernacular: “Who paints rolls of toilet paper and cigarettes?”
Who, indeed? Women like Ms. Barnhardt who are “filling gaps” in the Smithsonian’s collections, that’s who.
Ms. Chiu, a native of Australia, is an expert on 20th-century Asian art…At the Hirshhorn she said she is “filling in gaps in the global narrative.”
The museum’s current exhibit, “Feel the Sun in Your Mouth: Recent Acquisitions,” will do just that.
Feel the Sun in Your Mouth is titled after a phrase in French artist Laure Prouvost’s Swallow (2013), a video work in the exhibition that juxtaposes classical iconography of nude bathers lounging in streams with flashes of contemporary consumer culture, coaxing viewers to notice the pleasures of the senses and embrace the real yet often nonsensical world that surrounds them.
At one point in the piece the artist whispers the phrase; the video otherwise is punctuated by a staccato of gasping breaths and bucolic scenes of birds and nude bathers.
If that isn’t enough to make you book a trip to D.C. to experience this uniquely non-American art show, perhaps this entry by Japanese artist Minoru Hirata: ‘Natsuyuki Nakanishi’s Clothespins Assert Churning Action’ will:
It’s a photo of a model wearing a tinfoil head-covering decked in clothespins. There’s a gap that needed filling: a universal headgear that serves multiple purposes globally: a hijab for Muslim women, a dark place for liberal ostriches and a tinfoil hat for the rest of us.
Well done, Hirshhorn. You’ve met the terms of your charter.
Posted from: MOTUS A.D.
The total crap that is modern art only exists because gov provides endowments.
Eliminate the endowments and get rid of the junk. Art was good when artists could only become a non-starving one by selling to individuals.
I was in the National Portrait Gallery in our nation’s capital on Monday and was deeply moved by the works done in the 1800’s. On the other hand, the more recent works (circa 1960 and newer) were, for the most part, childish and pointless.
That art is right up there with Rembrandt and Michelangelo. /s
Liberals turning our cherished, nationals, artistic institutions into dumpster fires.
Here are my thoughts about ART. (I’ve actually gone to art school, and draw and paint in my spare time.)
Art was meant to inspire and uplift the human spirit. In classical art you see that, you have a feeling and connection to the great and beautiful.
Modern art in all of its forms doesn’t do that. You don’t feel inspired by cubes and blobs on a canvas, or things that look like piles of trash. There is no connection to the human spirit, nothing to attract you to the work. Modern sculpture can not compete with the classic bronze and marble beauty of the past. Ugly, and meaningless modern art is not an uplifting experience.
The same can be held with music and movies and most of modern architecture and works. Unappealing, vulgar, cold, and no connection to humanity. It looks bad and feels bad and sounds bad. Add in to this modern literature and you have completed the cycle. It is a concerted effort to degenerate, and reduce, and stomp down people. The world is beautiful, our true art works, music, sculpture, and literature is beautiful. If you look at something, hear something or read something that isn’t beautiful, it isn’t art.
The emperor’s new cloths. Nobody will say what crap the ‘art’ is, because everyone if afraid of hurting someone’s feeling by pointing out how stupid and gullible ‘art’ critics are.
So...a tinfoil hat is stylish now?
Who knew?
I actually like the last one.
I dropped the Wall Street Journal during their love affair with the Clintoons.
My wife goes to the local library to pick out her weekly reading, and I would check out the WSJ during her visits.
I stopped that during their continual attacks on Candidate Trump in 2016.
The Democrats ruined the art World nationwide at all levels in 1987 with the Piss Christ. I hope it was worth it.
If your ‘art’ is something a kindergartener can do, you definitely shouldn’t be in a national gallery. Really any gallery..
Oy.
Makes a much sense as “Can of Soup” by Worhal
Wasn’t that piece subsequently destroyed? Somebody slashed it in an art gallery?
I’ve seen street graffiti that was more “art” than that stuff.
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