RSS

Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

Cropped tableau courbet header

In the End, Perhaps, Lightness of Heart

I came to Hans Sedlmayr’s Art in Crisis, first published in 1948 , through Roger Kimball’s essay in which he termed the text a “blistering polemic.” I confess a weakness for blistering polemics. Nothing warms the heart faster in these imperiously nonjudgmental days. Morevover, Sedlmayr’s cultural pessimism conforms more convincingly to fallen man and his ever-falling times than our current dalliance with the saving powers of beauty. For a concise bio of Sedlmayr go directly to the Dictionary of Art Historians. Continue Reading

The Church Suffering

This past November, Cardinal Ravasi posed in New Statesman as the Vatican’s impresario of contemporary art. At the same time, a continent away, Bishop Johnson Mutek Akio of South Sudan stood with his people under genocidal assault by the al-Bashir regime. The cardinal’s ambition to get the Church back into the contemporary art business was hailed as “a bold move.” Silence greeted the bishop’s valor in risking his life to sustain a persecuted diocese. Heroic endurance in the face of Islamic terror does not conform to the sensibility—or insensibility—that understands culture as a kind of sauce poured like hollandaise over daily living, over thought and action. Continue Reading

Dhimmitude on the Cheap

Last night I watched Homeland on my laptop, streamed in by Amazon for $1.99. It is an unconvincing potboiler implausible on too many levels to count.buy temovate online https://www.mobleymd.com/wp-content/languages/new/temovate.html no prescription Last night’s storyline bent over every which way from Sunday to insure Islam’s place among the smiling aspects of life. “And they call us terrorists,” mourns the terrorist chief whose adorable young son was just killed by a drone attack. Scriptwriters huff and puff to insure we sympathize with this grave, mild-seeming incendiary. Continue Reading

Just For Fun

Trivia question: Do you know this girl? Of course you do. But who knew just how contemporary that Mona Lisa smile could be? A stylized, stock expression in Leonardo’s day, it suddenly looks quite current removed from its Renaissance setting and inserted into a post-modern one. The bloody amputation might be a bit over the top, but the figure’s facial mien—part simper, part sneer—would do nicely in a Vogue photo shoot. Not quite as enigmatic as it has been deemed down the centuries. Continue Reading

The Sixties, Still Breathing

Once more for emphasis: Contemporary art, properly defined, is simply the art of our contemporaries. The rest is marketing. The trademark product sold under the term contemporary artpromotes an ethos—a posture and set of mental habits— fueled by academia. Contemporary art is the academic art of our time. Its reach is as global as the market that distributes it. And political to the core. Here in my inbox is a press release from CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux. A tabernacle for contemporary art, the museum houses six-to-seven hundred works from the 1960s onward. Continue Reading
  • Contact
  • Recent Posts
Subscribe To The Newsletter

Subscribe To The Newsletter

Join the Studio Matters mailing list for an occasional heads-up. Thank you.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Premade image 14

Subscribe To The Newsletter

Join the Studio Matters mailing list for an occasional heads-up. Thank you.