Erica Galvin

The Birth of Venus , we often hear, depicts the ideal woman. Yet half a millennium after Sandro Botticelli painted it, how many of us whose tastes run to the female form really see it that way? “I’ve always been struck by how Venus is strangely asexual, and her nudity is clinical,” says gallerist James Payne, creator of the Youtube channel Great Art Explained . “Maybe that’s because she represents sex as a necessary function: sex for procreation, the ultimate goal in a dynastic marriage.” This, safe to say, isn’t the sort of thing that gets most of us going in the 21st century. But this famous painting does something more important than to show us a naked woman: it reveals, as Payne puts it in a new video essay , “a dramatic shift in western art.” If you accept the definition of the Renaissance that has it start in the 14th century, The Birth of Venus ‘ completion in the 1480s makes it quite an early Renaissance artwork indeed. In that period, “a renewed interest in ancient Gr...

Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” for the 50th anniversary of the Houston space, closely echoes Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel.” from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/tkDuReM via IFTTT

His plan for a former rail yard became the template for a neighborhood created by a coalition of civic groups and a brash developer named Donald Trump. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/atALE70 via IFTTT

Workers at nearly two dozen American art museums have created collective bargaining units in recent years to push for better pay and working conditions. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/x2h3PJt via IFTTT

During the era of the German Democratic Republic (1949 – 1990), high-ranking functionaries of the socialist state lived in simple houses in the Wandlitz residential area – a closely guarded district 25 kilometres north of Berlin, inaccessible to outsiders. In 2011, Berlin-based photographer Andreas Mühe (b. 1979) visited these buildings, capturing them surrounded by darkness. In the resulting shots, the dwellings become eerie and surreal, bright white facades imbued with a sense of unease. Mühe is one of Germany’s best-known artists, recognised for his explorations of sociological, historical and political themes. He stages compositions within elaborately constructed, dramatically lit settings – an approach mirrored by the likes of Rodney Graham and Thomas Demand. Stories of Conflict is Mühe’s latest solo exhibition, taking place at Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Amongst his most famous images are portraits of Angela Merkel: he accompanied the former federal chancellor on many o...

The 1960s moved very fast. The Beatles started 1963 as four freshly scrubbed moptops from Liverpool. By 1968 they were hairy hippies dabbling in drugs and mysticism. (And writing some of the best music of all time, don’t get me wrong!). Then there were the Monkees. Created by Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider in 1966 as a loving homage to the Beatles 1964-65 Richard Lester films, it too quickly changed. By 1968, the show and the band had run its course. There was already no cultural space for four lovable…anythings. And while many elements killed the optimism and radical hope of the 1960s–Vietnam, bad acid, Manson, Altamont –hats off to Head, the cult movie that annihilated The Monkees as a band, the band movie as a concept, and the concept of light entertainment as being on the side of the viewer. Obscenity, who really cares? asked Dylan a few years before. Propaganda, all is phony. That’s Head. What’s interesting about the Head story is trying to figure out the motivations of s...

Because they’re incredibly useful if you’re furnishing a small space. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/wshKrHG via IFTTT