In the 15th century, you might have encountered an image once a day, once a year, once in lifetime, or not at all. Today, we are practically swimming in images. They’re all around us. And because of this proliferation we take them as a given, natural occurrence. For our culture, an image or picture […]
Art
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Buyer beware: art on the internet
Two weeks ago, William Yager, owner of Roselawn Galleries in Pittsford, was arrested and charged with selling counterfeit art online. I was instantly curious, of course, about the details. What kind of counterfeit are we talking about? Fakes? Copies? Is there a difference? At least in principle, a work of art has always been […]
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Contemplating American beauty
Does art have to have meaning? Does it need to be spiritually uplifting, morally challenging, and politically provocative? Does art have to have a purpose? It’s an age-old debate, but a new exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery, highlighting the work of American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, offers a response to the schism between beautiful purpose […]
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The pin (and) ball wizard
Once upon a time, there were two Greek painters, Parrhasius and Zeuxis. Zeuxis was considered the greatest painter of still life in the ancient world. In a competition between the two artists, Zeuxis chose to paint an arrangement of grapes and placed the painting outside. It was so realistic that birds flew down to […]
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Everybody was Kung Fu fighting
Art and privilege have a lot in common. To produce images, you must be connected to the apparatus that allows images to be made, disseminated, and seen. When dealing with images of the underprivileged, the artist is responsible for the context in which the images will be viewed. For some, it may be just enough […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Everybody was Kung Fu fighting
Art and privilege have a lot in common. To produce images, you must be connected to the apparatus that allows images to be made, disseminated, and seen. When dealing with images of the underprivileged, the artist is responsible for the context in which the images will be viewed. For some, it may be just enough […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
A night at the opera
What is art? And what is art’s purpose? Are these questions that can even be asked, much less answered? Well, yes, if you exempt the last 100 years or so. Those objects and paintings that today we call “art” indeed had some very specific purpose within a particular culture at a particular point […]
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Narrating the visceral object
As the winter winds are set to billow across Lake Ontario, a wind of a different sort has already blown into Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery. It came in the form of a new director, Louis Grachos, who arrived this past January. Grachos has introduced several new initiatives calculated to reinvigorate the gallery, including a refocused […]
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Collecting the marks of the modern
There aren’t too many terms that have the ability to disquiet the bourgeois while enlivening the avant-garde, but “modern” or “modernism” can do just that. To be a modern painter can imply both a commitment to formal innovation and a challenge to the status quo. In this way, modernism in art can range from […]
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Time to grow up: RoCo comes of age
<pIn 1977 a new cultural institution, the Pyramid Arts Center, opened in Rochester. After 27 years, seven locations, and a name change to Rochester Contemporary (RoCo), its mission remains basically unchanged: to encourage the redefinition of contemporary art in Upstate New York. As the arts center prepared for its big re-opening on Friday, October […]
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A room of her own
We are quite often interested in artists who have exceptional lives. And if those lives involve scandal, intrigue, or illness, we become fascinated. This fascination manifests itself not only in the biographical, but in the work itself. We want to see the life illustrated in the work of these artists — Vincent Van Gogh […]
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How art talks to itself
In one form or another, the biennial Rochester-Finger Lakes exhibition has been a showcase for Western and Central New York artists for over 100 years. And this year is no exception, as the exhibition celebrates its 59th anniversary. Of course, what exactly the exhibition showcases has often been a source of controversy. And in […]
