The Brit-gone-LA artist was grabbing headlines earlier this month for his supposed swipe against Damien Hirst but now it’s his turn to take criticism from someone who knows his work, a former professor.
David Hockney
This post is an image-only art mix tape of 5 works of contemporary art chosen around the theme of summer. It’s my look at the oncoming season through art, specifically inspired by our recent humidity.
Arts Council England, a group within the English governmental Department of Art, Media and Sport, is an organization entirely devoted to funding the arts, performing, visual and literary. In total, the council currently funds 880 arts organizations and events. In September, “Britain’s coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats proposed a budget that could cut arts spending by as much as 25 percent,” reports the New York Times, a move that would help reduce the country’s budget deficit.
It’s still not clear where the budget cuts will lead, but it’s clear that artists and art organizations are speaking up against the disastrous impact the cuts could have.
Despite his image of a crotchety old traditionalist, David Hockney hasn’t been one to shy away from new technology. The artist, best known for his 60s portraits painted of California intelligentsia, has been making drawings and paintings on an iPhone since 2009, and recently scaled up to an iPad, using a simple brush app and a finger or thumbnail to paint. Sent out to friends or displayed to humorous effect on a tiny easel, Hockney is taking an old medium and carrying it out with new media tools that have only become prevalent in the past few years.
OUR FIRST WEDNESDAY BOOK REVIEW!
Reading Lawrence Weschler’s nigh-legendary book on Robert Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, inspired me to next grab the New Yorker writer’s other artist-focused book, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations With David Hockney. As entertaining as they are challenging, the two books are hard to categorize as biographies, though they concern individuals and their oeuvres. Weschler’s works are more like conversations: anecdotal histories formed less by research than by hanging out with an artist, watching exhibitions open and major works develop, witnessing a lifelong artistic practice.
Half the time I spend dumbfounded and in love with it has me asking myself whether or not it’s real, but San Francisco is still the easiest city in the world to have a crush on.
New York street artist Momo’s latest project took place in the unlikely town of Key West in the Florida Keys. The veteran street paster decided to work with locals on a one-to-one basis and create art works that would be integrated into their lives and bring what was normally a public piece of art into a very private domain, the home. Key West’s The Citizen newspaper described the project as “art for the masses.”
