Visual Arts
Three weeks ago I attended Friday evening services at the main synagogue of Isfahan. I cannot remember the last time that I went to a kabbalat Shabbat service, but I cannot have gone much more often than once a decade for the past 40 years. By Gary Schwartz Isfahan, gate of synagogue on Felestin Square…
A front-page story in the Boston Globe arts section last Sunday reminds us that the Pollock-Matter Affair is alive and well and moving to Boston. One of the biggest art world controversies in decades, this perfect storm of paint, press hype, and cultivated invective swirls around a group of Jackson Pollock-like art works that filmmaker…
Cleaning up my desk, I came across the following mysterious note, written on a sheet torn out of a small spiral notebook: “Now I see what you mean with the question you had about the stones outside who is different on every sides. I have asked but no one could give some answer. Maybe they…
During the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Gordon Matta-Clark did what many of us think might be cool, but never dare try to pull off.
Boston-area college art museums go where many mainstream exhibition spaces fear to tread. By Margaret Weigel Originally Published February 07, 2006 Boston, MA – Throw a stone in Boston and you’ll hit a college (or an undergraduate); throw it a little further, and you’ll likely hit a college gallery or museum. The Boston metropolitan area…
Given the growing inclination, in the name of security, to regulate public expression, is it any wonder that protest art is scarce?
Edgar Degas once said that painting should be akin to committing a crime. And many Americans saw creation of some of the most important works of American art as just that—roguish, cunning and wicked—in short, criminal. Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture by Michael Kammen. Penguin Random House, 480 pages, $18.…
By Peter Walsh When a new contemporary art museum gets up on its feet, it typically constructs a slick, fashionable new address for itself and leaves its old, recycled quarters like a student couch at the curb. But is that always a wise decision? Sometimes it makes sense to put new wine in old bottles.…
By Milo Miles World-famous jazz impresario George Wein went to Boston University. I went to Boston University. The Boston University Art Gallery is currently hosting the show Syncopated Rhythms: 20th-Century African American Art from the George & Joyce Wein Collection. Boston University is behind this blog. None of that matters: it’s still the most amazing…
By Adrienne LaFrance February 22nd, 2006 Chances are, when you think of interactive art the first thing that comes to mind is the lineup of cranks to turn, buttons to press, and microscopes to peer into at a children’s science museum. But the exhibition COLLISIONnine BOTbits (at Wellesley College though March 8, 2006) proves that…
Classical Music Commentary: What’s Next for the Boston Symphony? — Lessons from the Past