PHILADELPHIA — Talking about the limitations of photography, painter David Hockney said that art “must deeply involve an observer whose body somehow has to be brought back in.” At the time, he was pessimistic about the medium’s possibilities. Enter Barbara Kasten.
Harry Swartz-Turfle
Harry Swartz-Turfle is an artist and writer living in New York City. He was an award-winning crime journalist before dedicating his life to the seedier and more dubious prospects of art. He has been published online at MSNBC.com and NYTimes.com and written his blog DailyGusto.com since 2003.
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An Implied Critique of Sound Bite Society
Rackstraw Downes doesn’t seem like a radical. He is an understated Englishman who paints understated American landscapes. But when you think about how much of modern and contemporary art relies on juxtaposition or exaggeration for effects, Downes’s approach begins to seem downright revolutionary. “My idea is to paint the real nature of the world, which is always a complex mixture of things,” he told a packed auditorium at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, during a talk last month.
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Failing Better: William Kentridge’s Drawing Lessons
William Kentridge was a failure. By his own account, the South African artist racked up a long list of impressive defeats before succeeding as a draftsman and animator. Before the opening of his current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art Kentridge gave a lecture on “Drawing Lessons” at the New York Studio School.
