Art Education

Art Institutes, Debt & Education

The Art Institutes, the largest collegiate system for design education in the world, began in 1921. The Art Institute of Pittsburgh was the flagship school, a model for the complex which has grown to some 45 schools in North America. It specializes in design: graphic, industrial, game, and related applied art fields that have a chance of leading to—wait for it!—employment. That seems to stick in the craw of some readers. There are dark hints that something unsavory is afoot if [1] it is a for-profit system and [2] Goldman Sachs owns a controlling share in it. Continue Reading
Robert Dente, Painter and Printmaker

NEW YORK REMAINS A MARKETING CENTER but it has not been a creative center for at least two decades. Robert Hughes was saying as much in the early Eighties. Artists live where they like, where they can afford. They spend just enough occasional time in New York to get to know galleries where their work fits the stable. Gladhanding is an art in itself but it is not the primary one.  Good art is still made across the country by serious artists who have decided against the bruising demands of seeking name recognition in advance of the perfection of their work. Continue Reading
Pre-Raphaelites and the Myth of Italy

DANIEL B. GALLAGHER is an American philosopher and theologian stationed in the Vatican. He is exquisitely placed to pursue interest in aesthetics and, if I can phrase it this way, the intersection of aesthetics and metaphysics. Fr. Gallagher’s specific concerns are the adjoining issues of classical, medieval and modern theories of art and—beginning to assert itself once again—beauty. He writes in the current issue of The Berkshire Review for the Arts, a small, elegant international e-journal devoted to just what its name indicates. Continue Reading