Tag Archives: Jonathan Jones Guardian

all together now

Group portraits represent one of the most vexing problems a painter is ever required to resolve requiring as it may, expressive ingenities that defy standard compositional devices… In a group portrait each member must be awarded their proportionate measure of … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , | Leave a comment

hagel: bring it on home to zion

Is there any reason for this kicking the nominee for Defense secretary down the road? Like a Bruegel painting, the monstrous and deformed are indeed symbols of moral corruption as the lobbyists against Chuck Hagel’s nomination have tried to attach … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

high on the hog: boastful splendiferous types

…Of what there is no doubt is that this life was wasteful, extravagant, ostentatious- an appalling contrast, as Dr. Samuel Johnson noted, to the human wretchedness of rural or urban slums; yet it was saved both by its humanity and … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

lap of luxury

Let them eat falafel. It’s a lot of money. But Arafat had big bucks too. All this smoke signals and noises about statehood from the Palestinian Authority could just be hot air used as a pretext for money. Blackmail. Or, … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

decided and optimistic views

Josiah Wedgwood and his friends were the most brilliant group in England in the eighteenth-century- brilliant if highly eccentric. Most are forgotten today, but collectively they changed the world… Devotion to science and a respect for the arts were not … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

slave: barbarians and barter for the buck

Slavery. A peculiar institution of the Old World. The Greeks and Romans practiced slavery and condoned it; that is, condoned it for war, condoned it for luxury and condoned it for business. But even then, they knew it to be … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

a little piece of heaven?

Prostrate anxiety? the thingamagig complex. Objectifying the human body as part of splitting off the corporeal from the spiritual and convicting poor Eros of demon status, branding her forever with the unfavorable P.R. she has had to endure. The short … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

closet painter

A “flamboyant homosexual” as Dan Brown labeled Leonardo is misleading and irrelevant unless the author was searching for a DNA code for gay tendencies and not the other trail of splatter leading to the holy grail. Although a kind of … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

kids play: just tickety-boo

There is the theory of Walter Benjamin on the discarded object, the former fetish object of capitalist consumer culture that becomes re-animated and re-contextualized after attaining junk and discard status. Transformed into a toy.  It becomes re-emancipated with revolutionary potential … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Madame Pickwick Weekend | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

mad men

There was really no resemblance to social man. Artistically, a soul at war with the body in such visceral representations had heretofore gone unrepresented. The depiction of unreason in all its unfathomable, compelling, yet repulsive splendor. It was the beginning … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment