A collection of Anglo-European avant-garde and modernist magazines dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries has been compiled by Monoskop.
Dada
Posted inArt
Still Gaga for Dada, 100 Years Later
Dada: It was the mother of all revolutionary art movements, shocking in the almost mystical nihilism and concomitant absurdity that it expounded. Anti-aesthetic, anti-rational, anti-idealistic, anti-establishment, anti-literary … anti-everything it seemed!
Posted inArt
In Paris, Punk’s Curatorial Redemption
PARIS — Unlike the widely ridiculed Costume Institute show PUNK: Chaos to Couture, a show that examined punk’s impact on high fashion from the movement’s birth in the 1970s through its enduring influence today, Europunk: An artistic revolution, recently closed at Cité de la Musique, was rigorously periodic (ending in 1980) and broader in range.
Posted inArt
The Art of Nightlife, or Debauchery as Social Practice
“One point of art is that it’s forming something we don’t have the language for yet,” observes Jake Yuzna, Director of Public Programs at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), in discussing the FUN Conference on Nightlife as Social Practice.
Posted inArt
Duchamp’s Endgame, in Chess and Art
BRIGHTON, UK — Swapping out pieces in a game of chess is only a smart move provided you hold the most on the board, or at least the strongest position. But a new show at the Barbican in London suggests chess could be a “metaphor of exchange” between the artists it lines up. According to the theory, Duchamp swaps ideas with acolytes: John Cage, Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg. And yet the Frenchman, superb chess player that he was, came out conceptually on top by the time of his death in 1968.
Posted inOpinion
Who Said Dada Is Useless?
May this video put an end to the idea that Dada is all about impractical fun and games. It seems that Marcel Duchamp, like Leonardo da Vinci, was just ahead of his time.
Posted inArt
Thinking of Magazines as Art Objects
On average, we probably encounter magazines more frequently than art. To equate them, though, isn’t common practice. Is a New Yorker cartoon just a quirky little illustration, or is it a defining style of both humor and drawing that has become iconic not just of the weekly, but of the history of cartooning? Is a fashion spread in Harper’s Bazaar just luscious eye candy coxing consumers to buy clothes, or is it the collaborative result of aesthetic visionaries in the demanding creative fields of photography, creative direction and fashion? Are magazines glossy periodicals filled with ads, or are they works of art with revolutionary potential?