During the Holocaust, art was created because the act of creating is essential to what it means to be human.
By being traditional without being a quietist, and by being contemporary without being Avant-Garde, Grieshaber acts out an answer to the artist’s ethical problem of history.
Like most Americans, I used to go to museums mostly for class field trips. This type of museum-going tends to be more a social experience in which the group tries to see the greatest number of pieces, limited only by time and physical exhaustion. By contrast, yesterday was about the art-about seeing it and looking at it, and learning to receive it.
Simple steps to view and appreciate art with humility and understanding.
When art only pitches its tent in the vast lands of modernism, it “belittles the complicated and powerful ideas of beauty” spoken in classical paintings.
Stephen Assael is a surreal master of reality, and re-humanizes every subject by infusing every portrait with a deeper longing for a world to come.
Fifty years later, Robert Frank’s Americans are just as strange and striking, still alive and worthy of meditation. This may be, in part, because his Americans are simply living.
I’m no art critic, but Bruce Herman’s work speaks volumes to me about the condition of humanity, and about the tension between terror and wondering joy. What I find so compelling in Herman’s work is his use of color and texture to communicate both the vibrant perfection to be found in the ordinary people whose stories make up history, and their flaws and imperfections.
It’s interesting to note how, during the holiday season, when retailers are bending backwards to catch every potential shopper with any technique possible, the gallery district in Chelsea had only a smattering of open galleries on the weekend after New Years’. While they did swing back in full force over the next two weeks, if you didn’t know better, you probably wouldn’t think much had changed. Perhaps it hasn’t. Maybe art galleries are just a different kind of retailer.