Stuart Mark Feldman’s The Future in Our Hands By Michael Newberry Stuart Mark Feldman’s sculpture group, The Future in Our Hands (1992, Reservoir Park, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) is four life-size bronze statues placed around a large outdoor fountain. There are two males and two females, life-sized, each playing with a child. (To my knowledge, this is the […]
Newberry reviews Feldman sculpture *The Future in Our Hands* Read More »
Keynote speech this November on Figurative Art and Philosophy.
Keynote speech at TRAC art conference in November Read More »
From a letter from Beethoven to Franz Wegeler in Bonn, June 29, 1801: “You want to know something about my present situation. Well, on the whole it is not at all bad … My compositions bring me in a good deal; and I may say that I am offered more commissions than it is possible
Artist as entrepreneur versus patronage — Beethoven and Mozart Read More »
Mao Zedong, in keeping with Marxism, argued this about the nature and purpose of art: “In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that
Art and morality, Mao and Warhol Read More »
It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even to every Bachelor of Arts, That all sin is divided into two parts. One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important, And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant, And the other kind
“Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man,” Ogden Nash Read More »
From an account of the famous meeting of the two giants in 1812: Beethoven’s manners were described as rough, like “an unlicked bear,” while “Goethe’s social attitudes were shaped in a more formal age. For Beethoven, 21 years his junior, the only true aristocrats were artists. In the mythology, his disillusionment was clinched by Goethe’s
Goethe versus Beethoven on deference to aristocrats Read More »
[In 1967 (50 years ago this year), a commissioned sculpture by Pablo Picasso was unveiled in Chicago. Critic Alan G. Artner has a journalistic account of the unveiling and the piece’s subsequent legal-political saga. But the following excerpt from the great Mike Royko’s account of the crowd’s reaction captures the day’s significance best.] ON THE
Picasso comes to Chicago Read More »
I wrote this piece 15 years ago — my explanation of how two lines of development of modern art culminated in postmodernism. (Translations via here into German, Spanish, Korean, and Portuguese). Now I feel the need to write a follow-up: Why Art is Still Ugly. Related: * Taking Modern Artists at Their Word. September 2014.
Why Is Art *Still* Ugly? Read More »