ARTISTS DO LOVE TO THINK OF THEMSELVES as different from everyone else. They are first on line for the latest article, book, monograph or lecture on the problems of the artist’s personality and the mysterious springs of his creative power. They bathe in popular notions of their own otherness and cater to popular illusion like savvy account execs in ad agencies. It is so satisfying to count oneself a member of an exotic tribe that is, and always has been, temperamental, egocentric, neurotic, defiant, anarchistic, unreliable, licentious (that’s the best part), flamboyant, obsessed and all-around incorrigible. Continue Reading

Of Art & Work

Maureen Mullarkey

December 14, 2010

I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT ENJOY a look at one example of art-as-social-practice in action. Herewith, Portland State University’s MFA students exhibit their craft at the Portland Museum, Oregon: // // Here we see the social role of the artist being played out in a community setting. It is a wonderful thing. Their heads all point to the center like the spokes of a wheel. The wheel—mankind’s first truly revolutionary mechanical device. It made possible the Industrial Revolution and the very thing that gets your Prius from one place to another. Continue Reading

Gombrich, Again

Maureen Mullarkey

December 3, 2010

A PAINTER ON FACULTY SOMEWHERE emailed me to regret that Gombrich had become:

. . . a voice that is little heard at the schools in which I’ve taught. . . . “The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication” is particularly good in throwing students for a loop; “On Art and Artists” is nice, too. There’s only one other instructor at [Anonymous U], as far as I know, who introduces Gombrich to the students. Otherwise, his books are gathering dust in the library.

Thinking of Gombrich

Maureen Mullarkey

December 2, 2010

IS THERE AN ARTIST ANYWHERE who does not have Ernst Gombrich on the shelf? Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, or—my favorite—The Sense of Order are perennial staples in the studio. If there is room for only one book, The Essential Gombrich fills the bill. His The Story of Art is a stock item in libraries across the country. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across this footnote in Norman F. Cantor’s riveting Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century:

I have to admit that I must be almost alone in not learning anything of importance from the writings of (Aby) Warburg’s other famed student, Ernst H.

Forgery and Fiction

Maureen Mullarkey

November 10, 2010

VELÁSQUEZ’ ROKEBY VENUS SUFFERED VANDALISM IN 1914, when suffragette Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to it in London’s National Gallery. (In a 1952 interview she conceded that she “didn’t like the way men visitors gaped at it all day long.”) Known also as The Toilet of Venus or La Venus del espejo, painted between 1647 and 1651, it is the only surviving Velásquez nude. ” ” This pearl of great price is the motive force behind Michael Gruber’s tour de force of psychological suspense and up-market fraud, The Forgery of Venus. Continue Reading

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Born Under Saturn

Of Art & Work

Gombrich, Again

Thinking of Gombrich

Forgery and Fiction

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