Visual Arts

Short Fuse Book Review: Camille Paglia — She Raves

September 29, 2012
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If you try to take Camille Paglia seriously, despite the occasional insight you might find along the way, in the end it’s impossible to avoid the suspicion that you’ve made a category error.

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Visual Arts: Bureaucratic Vandalism and the Survival of Sheer Excellence

September 22, 2012
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In order to pay tribute to the supreme Frits Lugt and his Fondation Custodia — and to protest the announced closing of the Institut Néerlandais with which it is joined — the column describes an example of Lugt’s collecting genius.

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Short Fuse Commentary: Art and 9/11

September 11, 2012
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What percentage art? What percentage terrorist attack?

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Visual Arts Feature: A Workshop with Barry Moser, Abstract Bookwright

August 29, 2012
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Barry Moser’s decision to illustrate, in the end, is an extension of his probity. He would have been a fine abstractionist, but he found that he was better able to make art when he exiled himself from the kingdom of capital-A Art.

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Visual Arts Commentary: Boston Mural Stirs Controversy

August 18, 2012
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A mural painted on the side of a Big Dig ventilation structure in the Boston’s Financial District has generated enormous controversy.

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Visual Arts Essay: What is a Moment? — Two paintings of the wounded Eurydice by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

August 12, 2012
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Of course, I have no idea what was in Corot’s mind. But the juxtaposition of these images appears to me to present two different moments in time, perhaps adjacent ones, perhaps as close as possible, like adjacent frames of a film.

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Visual Arts Review: Ansel Adams — Water as Motion and Time

July 20, 2012
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By using water as a lens to explore Ansel Adams’s artistry, this exhibition makes his fascination with motion and time crystal clear.

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Visual Arts Feature: Rembrandt, Rubens, the Beau Sancy, and the Jew

May 22, 2012
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The history of the Beau Sancy took me back to the years around 1640, when it passed into and out of the orbit of the greatest Netherlandish artists of the day, the Dutchman Rembrandt and the Brabander Rubens.

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Book Review: Hey Look Me Over — “Just My Type”

May 16, 2012
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Simon Garfield’s tour of fonts, Just My Type, is a rollicking, sometimes snarky social history of the design decisions behind lettering from Gutenberg to the iPad.

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Coming Attractions: Jazz Week 2012 Update

May 2, 2012
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Swarms in the train station! Improv in the library! Video game hits and poetry! Must be Jazz Week–and there’s plenty more, including a major CD release by Argentinian bassist Fernando Huergo paying tribute to the land of the Albiceleste.

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