Stanley Cavell in his book Pursuits of Happiness writes about remarriage comedies in movies made after the advent of talkies (1934-1949). Cavell's list is as follows: The Lady Eve (1941), It Happened One Night (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Adam’s Rib (1949), and The Awful Truth (1937).
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Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
17.3.11
Book Review - Pursuits of Happiness: A Short Response
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
16.3.11
Movie Review: "Desert of Forbidden Art" (2010)
At Cinema Village in Manhattan,
Desert of Forbidden Art (2010)
is screening:
The documentary, filmed on location in Karapalpakistan (in Uzbekistan) a formerly held area of the Soviet Union, unveils the mystery behind why in Nukus, an otherwise barren town in the desert, is home to thousands of pieces of Soviet Avant-Garde art.
The answer lies in the life of artist Igor Savitsky.
Igor Savitsky was born from aristocratic Bolshevik roots; he became a worker to convince the new Soviet government that he had shed his aristocratic past. Desirous of the artist's life, he got a job drawing desert landscapes. He tried to become an artist but failed. Dispirited he moved to the desert city of Nukus. Unable to make it as an artist, Savitsky conjures up an idea to start a museum in the desert of Karapalpakistan to save revolutionary art from the censoring eyes of Soviet control. Artists who escape the gulag, or who come out of the gulag scarred, sought refuge in the desert to continue their work in secret.
Savitsky Created a Secret Museum of Art in the Desert
Savitsky is the collector who saves their pieces in his museum. Using state money, fooling officials about the content of the art, Savitsky was able to save pieces of art that spoke of the torture of the gulags and a pointing finger at the state-approved art that depicted the Soviet regime as growing and prosperous. The film is visually stunning. The filmmakers carefully construct the story about one man's fight against fascism but the film is also a document of the works themselves. The best part was the art itself, stunningly recaptured on film, the colors used by the artists is far from daubery. When I saw the film last weekend the film makes were there to speak about the movie. They spoke about the remote village of Nukus. It seems Uzbekistan does not care about the preservation of its Avant-Garde art.
The Future of the Museum's Avant-Garde Art Collection
The museum does not want to sell its collection, nor does the state government seem interested in persevering the art. In fact, as of this writing, the pieces are not displayed and seem to be destined for the trash heap if people do not stand up against the annihilation of art that Stavistky fought so hard to prevent. The documentary is timely because it speaks about a past censorship but seems to also be a call to action that art matters.
Check out the trailer:
Desert of Forbidden Art
More info from imdb.com
Desert of Forbidden Art (2010)
is screening:
The documentary, filmed on location in Karapalpakistan (in Uzbekistan) a formerly held area of the Soviet Union, unveils the mystery behind why in Nukus, an otherwise barren town in the desert, is home to thousands of pieces of Soviet Avant-Garde art.
The answer lies in the life of artist Igor Savitsky.
Igor Savitsky was born from aristocratic Bolshevik roots; he became a worker to convince the new Soviet government that he had shed his aristocratic past. Desirous of the artist's life, he got a job drawing desert landscapes. He tried to become an artist but failed. Dispirited he moved to the desert city of Nukus. Unable to make it as an artist, Savitsky conjures up an idea to start a museum in the desert of Karapalpakistan to save revolutionary art from the censoring eyes of Soviet control. Artists who escape the gulag, or who come out of the gulag scarred, sought refuge in the desert to continue their work in secret.
Savitsky Created a Secret Museum of Art in the Desert
Savitsky is the collector who saves their pieces in his museum. Using state money, fooling officials about the content of the art, Savitsky was able to save pieces of art that spoke of the torture of the gulags and a pointing finger at the state-approved art that depicted the Soviet regime as growing and prosperous. The film is visually stunning. The filmmakers carefully construct the story about one man's fight against fascism but the film is also a document of the works themselves. The best part was the art itself, stunningly recaptured on film, the colors used by the artists is far from daubery. When I saw the film last weekend the film makes were there to speak about the movie. They spoke about the remote village of Nukus. It seems Uzbekistan does not care about the preservation of its Avant-Garde art.
The Future of the Museum's Avant-Garde Art Collection
The museum does not want to sell its collection, nor does the state government seem interested in persevering the art. In fact, as of this writing, the pieces are not displayed and seem to be destined for the trash heap if people do not stand up against the annihilation of art that Stavistky fought so hard to prevent. The documentary is timely because it speaks about a past censorship but seems to also be a call to action that art matters.
Check out the trailer:
Desert of Forbidden Art
Directors:
Tchavdar Georgiev, Amanda PopeWriters:
Amanda Pope, Tchavdar GeorgievStars:
Edward Asner, Sally Field, and Ben Kingsley
Labels:
art,
artists,
censorship,
documentary,
history,
karakalpakistan,
Movie & TV,
movie review,
movies,
savitsky,
soviet union,
uzbekistan
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
10.2.11
Aesthetic Thursdays: Dionysos Holds a Theater Mask
Terra-Cotta Mixing Bowl, Dionysos and Young Pan, 410-390 B.C., Metropolitan Museum of Art |
Dionysos holds a mask. Masks were used by actors on stage to personate the roles they played. In this piece, Dionysos appears to hold a mask of himself. The mask he holds is identical to the artistic representation of his face. Dionysos wears the person of the character he personates. His mask is his person. To personate means to wear the person of someone. Person derives from the Greek word for "mask." To personate is to wear a mask. Personation is the act of personating. In an obsolete usage, a personation is also the mask itself. So we could say that Dionysos holds his own personation.
Labels:
aesthetics,
art,
greeks,
museum,
thursday
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
8.2.11
Stanley Cavell on the Aesthetic Autonomy of the Photographic Image
"Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, a way that could not satisfy painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction."
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed
Source: Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed : Reflections on the Ontology of Film. New York: Viking Press, 1971. Print.
Labels:
aesthetics,
art,
Art & Music,
philosopher,
philosophy of art,
photograph,
quotation,
quote,
subjectivity,
taste
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
3.2.11
Aesthetic Thursdays: Tony Feher
Art is fixated on its medium. Tony Feher has draped the walls and floor of the Pace Gallery in Chelsea with vinyl tubes filled with food coloring. Typical of contemporary art, Feher eschews traditional media and instead uses cheaply bought vinyl tubing and dye. Is it art? Well, if art is what is deemed sacred: no one stepped on the tubes during my recent visit. The Next On Line Exhibit runs till February 12th.
Labels:
aesthetics,
art,
thursday
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
27.1.11
Aesthetic Thursdays: Paul Chan at the Whitney Museum
1st Light
Labels:
aesthetics,
art,
Art & Music,
museum,
thursday,
Whitney
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
20.1.11
Aesthetic Thursdays: Keith Haring
Labels:
aesthetics,
art,
grafitti,
new york city,
thursday
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
13.1.11
Aesthetic Thursdays: In the Studio
In the Studio, Alfred Stevens. 1888. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City |
"In the Studio," is a nice example of art playing on art and reality. Notice the model sits on a couch entertaining visitors to the artist's studio. The unfinished painting of Salomé is perched on the easel to the right. The piece plays on the viewers perception of reality. Is the model posing for the work or is the representation of the unfinished work the work? Where does art end and reality begin? Works of art adorn the wall, as well. Notice the mirror. Another nod by Stevens of the mimetic nature of art. Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? The piece becomes more than a mise-en-scène of the artist's studio, but is a representation of the mimesis itself, the artist's craft, and the effect art has on the viewer viewing an artist's work, as if Stevens is inviting us to view both the process of art and the art itself as art. Brilliant.
Labels:
aesthetics,
art,
museum,
new york city,
thursday
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
24.12.10
Aesthetic Thursdays: Medusa
If the canvas is Perseus's shield, then this is Medusa's last stare.
Caravaggio, Medusa, 1597, Oil on canvas mounted on wood |
NB: If you want to check out the real shield, haunt the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy.
image credit: New Crafts, Co.
Labels:
art,
art gallery,
caravaggio,
gorgon,
greeks,
medusa,
mythology,
perseus,
uffizi
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
16.12.10
Aesthetic Thursdays: Caravaggio
Caravaggio's "Sacrifice of Isaac" is remarkable because it uncharacteristically depicts Isaac not as subordinate to Abraham's desire, nor blithely unaware of his fate, but rather as horrifically terrified by God's injunction to have him killed by his own father.
Caravaggio, Sacrifice of Isaac, 1603 |
Caravaggio, Sacrifice of Isaac (Detail) 1603 |
Labels:
abraham,
aesthetics,
art,
Art & Music,
biblical stories,
caravaggio,
painters,
sacrifice,
thursday
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
9.12.10
Aesthetic Thursdays: Death of Marat
David's Painting Is a Record of a Real Assassination
I don't have to create a story about the above painting. History already has one. During the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat was a journalist. Marat was killed in his bathtub. Apparently, he loved taking long, luxurious baths. He had a skin problem (so he needed to take soothing baths). On July 13, 1793, He was assassinated by Charlotte Corday because she thought Marat was a cause of the violence and bloodshed (The French Revolution is famous for how many heads rolled.) in France.
A Painting That Captures The Scene of a Crime
Marat was a radical Jacobin (which meant he was full-on anti-monarchy and full-on revolution). The jury is out on Corday's allegiances — some say she was in favor of the Monarchy while others said he was a supporter of the Girondins, a political faction who originally supported abolishing the monarchy, but later, became less radical in their politics. She was caught by the authorities and sentenced to capital punishment by the guillotine.
The Portrait of Marat Is Painstakingly Detailed and a Tribute to a Revolutionary
Looking closely at the painting, several features of the work are noticeable. The body of Marat is an idealized portrait of a corpse — similar to the paintings one sees of Jesus's body laid to rest. Marat's arm lays languidly on the side of the bathtub and he holds the tools of his trade — a quill and a parchment with a petition that had been given to him by Corday to sign. The knife that was used to kill him lies on the floor. David's careful arrangement of the scene makes Marat out to be the person he purported to be — a writer, and a revolutionary.
Labels:
aesthetics,
art,
caravaggio,
thursday
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
7.11.10
Art Review: Hitler McDonald
Learn about Noah Lyon, an artist in New York City who does mashups of Ronald McDonald-cum-Adolf Hitler.
Noah Lyon, an artist in New York City, has showcased at the New York Art Book Expo his poster image of an amalgam between Hitler and Ronald McDonald. Strangely, the combination seems appropriate, don't you think?
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
10.10.10
A Gloss on the Child and Wonder
"Blue Boy" Thomas Gainsborough |
Warning: This is merely a gloss and not a full argument. I am trying to think of the implications of the following issues for a larger paper on the topic of wonder: In 18th century British genre painting, the novel and lyrical poetry gives rise to the notion of the child as a category of spontaneity and innocence. Blake, exalts the child in his Songs of Innocence and describes experience as a rite of passage in the Songs of Experience. Art in this period glorified the child as well, like Gainsborough’s the Blue Boy. The child as imaginative exuberance fits nicely into the Romantic project for what poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge tried to do was to break away from the stodgy hierarchies of Classicism to create a new kind of poetry that favored immediate experience and truth-seeking through the natural, everyday things of life. Coleridge sought to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, creating nostalgic lyrics that suggest tales of a Mediaeval source but are actually products of a childhood imagination. Romanticism, according to critics like Philip Aries and James Kincaid, created a rift between adult and child as two separate entities. Kincaid writes in his book Child-loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, “However much of childhood radiance is lost by the adult and however difficult the connections may be to recover, Wordsworth and Coleridge are not talking about two species staring at each other across the chasm of puberty but about a form of imaginative and spiritual continuity” (63). For Coleridge the child and his own childhood is a spring of “imagination and spiritual continuity”. There is this idea of the child who is not marred by Blakean experience, untrammeled by the vicissitudes of life, is the engine of art.
I wonder though if we have misinterpreted the project of Romanticism proper. It is not that the child, as such, is the inspiration for art, but that art is born from the child. To be an artist one must be like a child in only one way: to wonder. Bridging the gap of experience, the only thing the artist takes with him from childhood, is wonder, but transmuted -- not the wonder of being in its fullness, which puberty finds it to be a sham -- but the wonder of being in its limits. For isn't the project of adulthood the wonder of being a philosopher? The fear of death no longer is the fear that there is no God, the fear of the child, but rather, that in death, we will no longer be able to philosophize.
Feel free to share your own ideas, below:
I wonder though if we have misinterpreted the project of Romanticism proper. It is not that the child, as such, is the inspiration for art, but that art is born from the child. To be an artist one must be like a child in only one way: to wonder. Bridging the gap of experience, the only thing the artist takes with him from childhood, is wonder, but transmuted -- not the wonder of being in its fullness, which puberty finds it to be a sham -- but the wonder of being in its limits. For isn't the project of adulthood the wonder of being a philosopher? The fear of death no longer is the fear that there is no God, the fear of the child, but rather, that in death, we will no longer be able to philosophize.
Feel free to share your own ideas, below:
Labels:
art,
blake,
childhood,
coleridge,
gloss sexual abuse,
imagination,
metaphilosophy,
philosophy,
wonder,
wordsworth
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
4.9.10
Photograph: The Squid and the Whale
Labels:
art,
Art & Music,
marine biology,
museum,
new york,
photograph,
science
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
4.3.10
What is the Difference Between Immanence and Transcendence?: A Visual Philosophy Primer
Look at the two following details from
School of Athens, Raphael, The Vatican |
Raphael's mural "The School of Athens." In the first image, a depiction of Aristotle shows him thrusting his arm outward; while, in the latter picture, the figure of Plato points towards the heavens. What do these two images tell us about the interplay between what is at hand and what is out of reach?
Aristotle points his hand outward as a sign of immanence.
Plato points his index finger upward to the sky as a sign of transcendence.
credits:"The School of Athens." Raphael. The Yorck Project:10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002.ISBN 3936122202.
Labels:
art,
immanence,
Raphael,
transcendence
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
9.2.06
Aesthetic Thursday: "Agrippa Fecit": The Pantheon of Rome
I bookmark a few facts about the Pantheon in Rome in this post.
View of the Exterior of the Pantheon Image Credit: Greig Roselli |
2. It was initially dedicated to all the gods of Ancient Rome, but it has since been used as a Catholic church known as Santa Maria ad Martyres.
3. The building is renowned for its architectural achievement, with a giant dome that covers the entire main chamber and an oculus at its center, which allows natural light to enter the room below it.
4. The Oculus measures approximately 8 meters (27 feet) wide. It allows sunlight into the Pantheon during daytime hours when opened fully - although there are no windows or other means of entering direct light inside otherwise!
5. Inside, you can find many beautiful sculptures, such as statues of major gods from Ancient Greece & Rome, and paintings on marble walls depicting scenes from Roman mythology & history - making this one of the most impressive monuments in Italy!
Video Credit: Ariel Viera
Download Art History & Humanities Lessons and Activities from Stones of Erasmus |
Labels:
Aesthetic Thursday,
ancient rome,
architecture,
art,
art history,
learning,
oculus,
pantheon,
video
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
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