Thanks to the bloggers at Bowery Boogie, I’ve discovered an incredible cache of rare video clips from the 20th century, including this footage of the rough and tumble streets of the East Village during the late 1980s and the city’s subways system in the 1960s.
Tag: David Hockney
Posted inOpinion
Blame David Hockney: Francesco Clemente Creates an iPad Art Work
What’s the appeal of an art work on an iDevice? Is it because we are familiar with these by now ubiquitous tools and work created on them give the air of being “current”? If that’s the case, maybe we should change our thinking on the matter.
Posted inArt
From Action to Inaction: The Tate’s Exploration of Performative Painting
LONDON — It is with the pairing of two 20th-century giants in one room, Jackson Pollock and David Hockney, that the relationship between performance and painting is introduced in A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance, an exhibition currently on view at the Tate Modern.
Posted inOpinion
Do Artists Actually Confront Our New Technological Reality?
Art historian and associate professor at New York’s CUNY Graduate Center Claire Bishop has taken to the pages of Artforum’s September edition to issue a kind of rebuke for contemporary art. She argues, in an extended essay that only briefly detours into egregious artspeak, that though the new realities of technology and the internet provide the fundamental context for art currently being made, art and artists have failed to critically confront this context and are too content simply to respond and adapt to it.
Posted inArt
Art in London: 5 Things to See Right Now
LONDON — If you’re looking for respite from the bacchanalian bustle of the Big Smoke at 20 degrees or just looking to punctuate those protracted bouts of sun-worshipping, don’t miss the following.
Posted inArt
David Hockney Returns Home
Bruno Wollheim’s David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is a much more straightforward account than Jack Hazan’s 1974 movie A Bigger Splash. It brings Hockney’s life full circle — the earlier film followed the artist’s move from London to Los Angeles while Wollheim’s film deals with Hockney’s return many years later to his childhood stomping grounds of East Yorkshire.
Posted inOpinion
David Hockney Disses Hirst, Now Former Professor Trashes Him
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.
Posted inArt
Five Works of Art for the Beginning of Summer
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.
Posted inNews
What’s Up With UK Arts Funding Cuts?
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.
Posted inArt
Drawing on the iPad, an Old Medium for New Media
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.
Posted inBooks
Reading Lawrence Weschler on David Hockney
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.
Posted inArt
Obsessions: de Young, San Francisco, Photo Composites
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.