Tourists, Travelers, Vagabonds
Summer and travel. For those of us fortunate enough to be able to afford to get out of the Cities, to the cabin or up north, summer and travel make an unbeatable combination. Of course, camera phones and digital cameras come along for the ride. Looking at the Museum of Russian Art’s current show on [...]
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The Mystique of the Mississippi
Listen to Paul Robeson’s 1936 recording of Old Man River: unconcerned with petty human worries—growing food, avoiding pain and dodging prison, dealing with daily toil and racial inequalities—the river just keeps rolling along. While the singer dreams of leaving the river and all it stands for, including his “white man boss,” in favor of the [...]
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Mutts, Migrations, and New Homes
Fall 2008 has been a time of transition in more than a seasonal sense. As of November 4, we have a new president elect who, to the unmitigated delight of a great many Americans of mixed ethnic and/or cultural descent, compared himself to a mutt recently. Barack Obama embodies the United States of the 21st [...]
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Art and the City
Do cities count as art? I am not talking about public monuments and architecture, street art and gallery scenes, landscaped parks and sparkly fountains–but the city itself, any city–that often chaotic, messy mosaic of neighborhoods and highways and strip malls that make up an urban space.
Robert Tannen, artist and urban planner, would say yes, unequivocally.
“Stardust: [...]
Viral Visions
Picture Vienna at the turn of the last century: an imperial city, home to the Habsburg court, a city between pomp and decay, caught (as if off guard) between the waning days of a centuries old monarchy and a budding bourgeoisie. Picture a city radiating outward from the Ringstrasse, a then recently constructed wide boulevard [...]
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Of Property and Propriety
Duchamp, Warhol, Prince, Levine, Sherman, Peyton—the canon of art history is riddled with the names of those who relied on appropriation and with their statements about the ultimate futility of the exhausted (and exhausting) quest for originality. Appropriation, it seems, has become just one more strategy in today’s creative toolbox: no longer risqué unless troubled [...]
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Vandalism, Re-Interpreted
Last summer, my garage got tagged. I remained oblivious to the fact until the city sent me a notice, kindly providing me with a deadline to remove or cover up the black marks. Eventually, well before the deadline expired, I dug up a can of paint that someone must have abandoned in my basement and [...]
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Returning to A Place Called Home
Leaving the Twin Cities on one of the first appropriately cold weekends this November, I visited Hudson to take in the current exhibition at the Phipps, where six women—a sculptor, a photographer, a printmaker, a textile artist, a weaver, and a painter—delve into the complex meanings of home, place, memory, and transitions.
Most interesting among the [...]
The Ambiguity of Wonder
Artists have sought to represent the natural world for almost as long as people have been awed into reverential silence by nature’s sublime attractions. Historically, the convergence of nature and art has been, if not tumultuous, subject to occasional controversy—think, for example, of Damien Hirst’s carcasses floating in formaldehyde or the insects in Huang Yong [...]
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Landscapes of Loss and Transformation
Loss always comes unbidden. It is a profoundly involuntary experience; we do not choose to lose someone, or something, that we care about. How are we to come to terms with this experience that has been forced on us? In the light of loss, our lives turn strange and incomprehensible. Grief takes time. Re-arranging a [...]
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