Visual Studies | The Smart Set

Girlhood

Marti Trgovich — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 11:54:14 +0000

If there’s ever been a time to dissect the experience of being a girl, it’s now: there’s girl math and girl dinner, “I’m literally just a girl” is a viral meme, pink bow emojis are rampant, you can dress like a ballerina and no one bats an eye, and No Doubt’s ’90s anthem “Just a […]

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Circle of Angels

David M. Rubin — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:30:00 +0000

A foreshortened dove soars to us, wings outstretched. The pure white bird has dipped down to clear the trees, or perhaps has just condensed from cloud. Moving or frozen in space, the bird is perfectly centered above a hand holding a clamshell, gently pouring water. It is the embodiment of the Holy Spirit and is […]

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Asking What’s Real and What’s Not

Marek Makowski — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 15:48:24 +0000

When I discovered her work, I was searching for a different Madeleine Gross. The days of lockdown wearied me; I lay in bed, at night or during the afternoon or morning (time was unbroken and the same), swiping to find how others had changed. I sought one of my many now-anonymous former coworkers from a […]

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Georgia O’Keeffe and ROYGBIV

Kelsey Dufresne — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 13:44:08 +0000

“Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my effort to create an equivalent with paint color for the world — life as I see it.” Georgia O’Keeffe, 1937 Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers, skulls, and landscapes […]

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Chucho Bedoya’s “Chucherías” Exhibit at Bogotá’s Galeria Fenix

Jeremy Ray Jewell — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 12:30:00 +0000

As you walk uphill from Bogotá’s iconic Colpatria Tower and through the Parque de la Independencia, you have only a few blocks before you meet the Cerros Orientales . . . the Eastern Hills. There the Adean city’s center abruptly ends in the shadow of Monserrate Mountain, a pilgrimage site since pre-Hispanic times. This plateau […]

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Finding a Framework

Robert Detman — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 12:28:00 +0000

He speaks in a calm voice, using measured, thoughtful words that belie an intellect assessing his material. There is a hush to his not quite halting English. If you do not know him you might take his tentative, searching locutions for shyness. Perhaps it is that. I always believed I could see his mind working […]

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Spot Makers

John Capista — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 11:30:00 +0000

When Marcel Duchamp exhibited his Nude Descending a Staircase at New York’s famous Armory Show in 1913, the New York Times called the painting “an explosion in a shingle factory.” At the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, Harvard professor and literary critic Irving Babbitt described it as a book that could only have been written “in an advanced stage of psychic disintegration.”  When confronted with something new, unusual, or different, critics […]

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When Gekko Collects Art

Stoyan V. Sgourev — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 11:30:03 +0000

Art is remarkably popular these days. When I tell people that I am an academic working on the art market I often get an approving nod of the head that almost makes me feel like I am doing something meaningful with my life. But one also starts suspecting that the art market may be becoming […]

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On the Edge of Art and the Everyday

Will Cordeiro — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 15:39:39 +0000

My favorite moment when visiting any art museum is leaving it. While I’d claim to enjoy viewing art, two to three hours strolling through most collections can give me museum fatigue. Stepping out on the street, however, I gawk astonished on the colors, forms, and composition of everyday objects. Traffic light, mini-skirt, trash can, movie […]

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Conspiracy Theory As Art

Scott Beauchamp — Thu, 10 May 2018 11:08:26 +0000

Place a horse head from the Paleolithic paintings of Chauvet Cave beside footage from a Netflix show and compare them. Both are art, in the broadest sense, and both are (primarily) visual, but the similarities end there. In his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin already anticipated most of […]

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