Posts Tagged ‘art’
The Failure of Art Criticism
American Idol is flawed in so many ways. Not only does it not identify idols (nobody goes on to the spectacular artistic careers that are the implied "prize") but it demonstrates how futile the exercise of criticism is.Simon Cowell's acerbic criticism may be surprising, and therefor entertaining, but really, it takes more talent, ingenuity and ego [...]
Why I Like the Canadian Olympic Pavillion
It's very classically a shed. What could be more Canadian? It looks like you could buy it at Canadian Tire. In fact, one wonders why they didn't go a small step further and invest the $9.2 it cost in actual sheds and duct tape them together. They could have bought 920 of these babies and after the games they could have distributed them to backyard [...]
The Art Instinct – book review
Denis Dutton got tired, as most of us do, of trying to find justifications for the arts. So he started looking for an explanation so basic that if enough people knew about it, none of us would ever again question the need for art. All that explaining and educating and begging could just stop. In The Art Instinct Dutton argues that art is a [...]
Border Crossings
With the entire publishing industry howling around them, it's nice to see somebody taking a counter-intuitive approach. Border Crossings magazine has enlarged its pages while continuing to pack 160 of them with rich text and images reproduced in full colour. It is also is somehow able to produce artists' projects; in the current issue a multi-page [...]
Séraphine, Poor Mad Artist
The myths that underlie what Hans Abbing calls "the exceptional economy of the arts" are periodically reinforced by reality and when they are it is not unlikely that those rule-proving exceptions will be noticed, even celebrated, as if to say to unbelievers, "See, I told you so."Thus we have such ideas as: that art is situated so dangerously close [...]
The $29 book about the $12 million stuffed shark
Had author Don Thompson started his book, The $12 million stuffed shark: the curious economics of contemporary art, where it ends, with the chapter on Contemporary Art as an Investment, few readers would have made it past chapter one. So sobering is the economist's view of the dismal financial returns to be had from playing the art market, that [...]
New ideas drive new research
"If we have even a vague inkling of where things are going, we should see if we can flesh it out with observations, because then we start building the foundation for change..."I said that here, in the first of what has become this series of posts on research.A few days ago I received a fresh, new study called Visiting Art Museums which [...]
Reading – it’s crazy!
Contra what the mostly university educated readers of blogs like this might think, literacy is a big issue. Kate Beaton, a webcomic artist, made this T about it.
Why Are Artists Poor? 2
Hans Abbing's book Why Are Artists Poor? should be assigned reading for every art student because it talks about the place of art and the artist in society in practical ways, from the viewpoint of the economist, somewhat objective, from ten stories up as Abbing puts it. Abbing, who is both a visual artist and an economist, gives us a view we in [...]
