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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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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 […]

Dancing Horses in Grand Central

Public art is rarely this much fun. Mark your calendars, please! Nick Cave is a lively, unpredictable performance artist and fabric sculptor who trained as a dancer with Alvin Ailey. Widely recognized for his wearable artworks—equal parts folk art and sophisticated funk—he performed at the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies fiftieth anniversary soiree this […]

Venice, Redux

My term “engine of evangelization” might have created some confusion. Let me clarify. God knows, the art world is mission territory. To be sure. But that is not the purpose of Vatican City’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale. No one proposes to proselytize the money changers with a lagoon view at the Hotel Danieli. The […]

Infrequently Asked Questions

What is it about contemporary art—every international art fair’s signature product—that qualifies it as an engine of evangelization? If the Church’s magnificent patrimony of high religious art has not stayed the attrition of Christianity in its homelands, can we expect today’s fashionable brands to speak more eloquently to the heathen art crowd who turn up […]

Art of Refusal

Donald Knuth needs no introduction to computer geeks. He is a world-renowned computer scientist, Stanford’s legendary laureate of algorithm analysis, and author of the seminal, multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming . His books are dedicated not to the usual suspects—the wife, the soul mate, the amanuensis beyond price—but to a computer: the Type 650 “in […]

#askpontifex

Saints . . . reformed the Church in depth, not by working up plans for new structures, but by reforming themselves. What the Church needs in order to respond to the needs of man in every age is holiness, not management. –Joseph Ratzinger Our president has a hashtag; now our pope has one, too. Benedict […]

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