Joseph Beuys is a canonical postwar artist, but was he really as progressive and enlightened as we’ve come to believe, and as he led us to think? A new biography of the artist, written by German-born Swiss author Hans Peter Riegel, kicks up the age-old debate about the separation of the artist and the art by contending that Beuys was actually a dedicated follower of the occultist and racist ideas propagated by philosopher Rudolf Steiner, and that he hung out with quite a few former Nazis.
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André Malraux, the prolific French critic and Minister of Culture under Charles de Gaulle, once wrote that art is an “anti-destin,” a revolt against destiny. And by that measure, the country’s recently-released report calling for a tax on internet-connected devices to fund cultural production qualifies simultaneously as artless and a work of art in itself.
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Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was denied early release from prison last Friday, with a Russian judge saying that Tolokonnikova had “not always followed the rules of behavior” in custody, according to the AP.
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New York City councilmembers and labor leaders, united under the auspices of Teamsters Joint Council 16, gave a press conference on the steps of City Hall yesterday, again blasting the use of non-union labor for Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s Island.
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With the release this week of his proposed 2014 fiscal year budget, President Obama has followed through on his campaign promise to increase funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and, in general, to support the arts.
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The name Joseph J. Lhota may not be a household one (yet), but the current Republican mayoral candidate has done a lot in his time in New York City politics. Art worlders may remember him as the man who led the Giuliani administration’s push to bully the Brooklyn Museum into censoring an artwork from the Sensation exhibition.
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It’s hard to tell how many young Americans know the name John Dewey today. Those who attended New York City’s New School might know of him as a co-founder and one of the minds behind the progressive agenda that formed the intellectual and social foundation of the school’s early years. Others might recognize the name because of his most well-known work, as an early theorist and proponent of progressive education for students of all ages. And some might be aware of him as a thinker who, in some ways, was discussing post-modern ideas about a hundred years before post-modernism. For those to whom his name is very familiar, he is said to be one of the most, if not the most, influential American philosophers. But here I want to talk about one of his lesser-known works, Art as Experience, which brings together some of his larger political and philosophic ideas in a discussion of aesthetics and culture, and their role in a robust society.
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A photograph of Obama behind a podium hangs below the image of a glaring white cross, aflame. Black-and-white figures taper down the wall unceremoniously, but beautifully balanced amid scuffs and marks. This is a photograph of the artist Kara Walker’s studio wall, and she’s showing us the process by which her latest controversy was created.
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In the summer of 2012, University of Michigan anthropologist Jason De León and a group of his students were doing fieldwork in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona when they came across the body of a 41-year-old woman. Her name was Marisol, and she was dead. She had been for four days.
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Charles Krafft’s artwork would be creepy no matter what. The artist makes porcelain ceramics in the traditions of Dutch Delftware and Italian maiolica pottery, but with a postmodern twist: the pieces are shaped like guns and grenades, or feature scenes of warfare and death (Disasterware), or portraits of Hitler and Charles Manson. There is a soap and cologne set called “Forgiveness,” which features swastikas. And Krafft creates china pieces — memorial and reliquaries, according to his site — using human cremains instead of calcinated cow bone.
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