This week, Christian Marclay’s unoriginal(?) “The Clock,” art in post-revolution Egypt, power of Renaissance portraiture, GIF trends, Gagosian troubles, Adolph Gottlieb’s words in 1966 and more.
Having not paid a dime for any of the clips he used, Marclay claims, and rightly so, “fair use,” while the museums that now own and show the video will certainly charge their increasingly steep admission fees. What for Marclay was free for the taking, the public will have to pay for.
And most shockingly, did Marclay swipe young artist Etienne Chambaud’s idea?
Rather than being confined to art galleries or movie screens, this new wave of artistic expression is spilling over into all areas of life and causing previous boundaries to crumble.
Portraits of power go back to the beginning of recorded history, but, as The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini, which runs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 18, 2012, shows, it was the artists of the Renaissance who resurrected Greek and Roman models and modernized them for their day and our own.
I think that one of the problems is that today what we are witnessing is the development of art in a democracy, and this never existed before. The idea of a democratic art which can reach many people ultimately must be a notion of some kind of mass culture. And this is the dismal aspect.
In 1950s to 1980s Britain, when philistinism was an overt part of British upper-middle class life, it would have been particularly unattractive for artists to join that club.
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning-ish, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth a second look.