Posts from the “Crave” Category

By Any Memes Necessary

Posted on February 19, 2017

Artwork: Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q, 1919

Yesterday, while writing a story for Crave Online covering By Any Memes Necessary, a gallery exhibition of meme art at Junior High, Los Angeles, I was hit by a lightning bolt of recognition.

The line from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol continues to this vital, viral new form of readymades, subversive delights that find their provenance in Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q.,” which they teach in Art History 101 with a straight face. Duchamp literally took the piss out of the white cube with his “Fountain,” all good taste swept aside for the radicalization of the form and the creative process—which is what memes do, so brilliantly.

I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next, what bold mastermind will pick up the mantle of Warhol and push culture beyond the boundaries of the known, knowing, as he knew, “Art is anything you can get away with.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions

Eisen Bernard Bernardo: Album+Art

Posted on February 19, 2017

Artwork: Lemonade by Beyonce + Natural Princess by Sophie Anderson. © Eisen Bernand Bernardo

Artist Eisen Bernard Bernardo is the mastermind “Album+Art,” a brilliant series of visual mash-ups that pair classic pop music albums with classical paintings to breathtaking effect. This is fourth installment of the “+Art” project, which started in 2009 with “Mag+Art,” a series pairing magazine covers with paintings that went viral in 2014. The following year, a follower challenged Bernardo to use album covers instead of magazines, and the result has thrilled people around the world.

The pairings reveal the eye of an expert with a vast vocabulary of both pop music iconography and art historical references. “I’m fond of homage, similarities and references in movies, music, and other art forms. I felt that album covers (like other contemporary artforms) were inspired directly (and/or indirectly) by classical paintings. I wanted to compare and contrast modern and classical aesthetics,” Bernardo explains.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: The Freewheelin Bob Dylan + The La Rue Bavolle by Claude Monet. © Eisen Bernand Bernardo

Categories: Art, Crave, Music

The David Hockney Takeover!

Posted on February 16, 2017

Artwork: David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1971 Private Collection© David Hockney. Courtesy of Tate Britain.

Has there ever been a painter of modern life as celebrated as David Hockney? The British artist, who celebrates his 80th birthday this July, is being fêted with the largest retrospective of his career at the Tate Britain and a flurry of fabulous new art books celebrating his incredible body of work.

While a student at the Royal College of Art in London, Hockney was included in the 1963 exhibition Young Contemporaries, which signaled the arrival of British Pop art. A year later, he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived for four years, creating his seminal painting, A Bigger Splash (1967), which has been knocked off with reckless abandon.

Over a period of six decades, Hockney has transformed the nature of picture making through his relentless questioning of conventions, always seeking to go deeper to connect with art’s very essence. The exhibition at the Tate, simply titled David Hockney, starts with the Love paintings, early work made in 1960 and ’61, in which he subverted the macho language of abstract expressionism and subverted it into a vehicle to express homoerotic ideas and experiences.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: David Hockney. English 1937–. The group XI, 7-11 July 2014. acrylic on canvas. 122.0 x 183.0 cm. Collection of the artist. © David Hockney. Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt. rom David Hockney: Current (Thames & Hudson, May 2017).

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Dr. Octagon Returns!

Posted on February 15, 2017

In 1996, Hip Hop had reached new heights, achieving crossover success with music coming out of the East and the West. With labels like Bad Boy and Death Row leading the way, the Golden Age of Hip Hop was about to enter the Age of Bling. In many ways, ’96 was a turning point: the culture, now 23 years old was had begun a schism between the mainstream and the underground, with the more innovative cats keeping close to the roots of the movement, creating something entirely new.

That extra fresh style and sound was the hallmark of Dr. Octagon, a group so innovative it left many confused for it went beyond Hip Hop’s outer limits. Dr. Octagon came together in 1996 through an unusual combination of fate and serendipity.

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Categories: 1990s, Crave, Music

Extreme Conservation at Kaziranga National Park

Posted on February 14, 2017

Photo: An Indian one horned Rhino seen crossing a road inside the Kaziranga National Park, on February 13, 2017 in Assam, India. Photo: Anuwar Hazarika/Barcroft Images / Barcroft Media via Getty Images.

Deep in the heart of Assam, India, Kaziranga National Park is home to two thirds of the world’s great one-horned rhinoceroses. A World Heritage Site, Kaziranga is a conservation success story. When it was founded in 1908, there were only a handful of rhinoceroses left as big-game hunters and poachers had decimated a once-thriving population.

Today, Kaziranga is home to more than 2,400 rhinoceroses. How did the park achieve this incredible conservation feat? Simple. The government has protects park rangers from prosecution if they shoot and kill people in the park.

A new BBC investigation uncovers a controversy surrounding these extreme conservation methods. The BBC quotes a park ranger, Advesh, as explaining, “The instruction is whenever you see poachers or hunters, we should start our guns and hunt them.”

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Categories: Crave

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors

Posted on February 13, 2017

Artwork: Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013. Wood, metal, glass mirrors, plastic, acrylic panel, rubber, LED lighting system, acrylic balls, and water, 113 ¼ x 163 ½ x 163 ½ in. Courtesy of David Zwirner, N.Y. © Yayoi Kusama

“Art is like an endless ocean. I can feel a sense of infinity, the heaven and sky—all a sense of infinity that I can feel through the ocean,” Yayoi Kusama tells Melissa Chiu in a conversation in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, the exhibition catalogue published by DelMonico Books/Prestel that accompanies an exhibition by the same name at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. this February. The Hirschhorn is the first stop on a two-year, five-city tour; a full list of venues and dates appears at the end of this story.

Infinity Mirrors is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of 2017, as it includes six of Kusama’s mindblowing Infinity Mirror Rooms. By now you’ve seen them in countless selfies taken by museum attendees around the world. Kusama has constructed magical spaces that capture the captivating expanse of vast, unknowable universe in rooms filled with multi-colored LED lights. All the surfaces are mirrors so that the result is a gloriously expansive sense of being launched into outer space.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Japan

How the ACLU Harnessed the Power of Social Media to Deliver Hope

Posted on February 12, 2017

Photo: Protesters are seen during a rally to protest the executive order that President Donald Trump signed clamping down on refugee admissions and temporarily restricting travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries in New York City on January 29, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/WireImage)

On Thursday, February 9, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) hit one million followers on Twitter. Since the election, the non-profit organization has become a leader in the fight to protect the Constitution. It has honed in on the power of social media to spread the word, with its Facebook following skyrocketing nearly 300% from 700K followers to 2 million. At the same time, it has nearly doubled its membership to 1.2 million, a record for the 97-year-old organization, at the same time.

Understanding that the fight to protect the Constitution will be won in the court of public opinion as well as in the court of law, the ACLU made their intentions clear three days after the election with a full page ad in The New York Times that warned the President, “We’ll see you in court.”

The organization has made good on their promise and stepped up to the plate with the first test against the new administration on Saturday, January 28, when the government announced it would begin banning people from seven predominantly Muslim countries in Africa and the Middle East. The ACLU immediately took to the courts, filing for and winning an emergency stay at the Eastern District of New York Courthouse in Brooklyn, New York.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Crave

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks

Posted on February 9, 2017

Artwork: Untitled Notebook (front cover), 1980–81. Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960–1988). Mixed media on board; 9 5/8 x 7 5/8 x ¼ in. Collection of Larry Warsh. Copyright © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, all rights reserved. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum

Like a prophet, Jean-Michel Basquiat was ahead of his time, alternately embraced and exploited by the art world. The artist, who first became known in the late 1970s, produced more than 2,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and mixed-media works before his death in 1988. He also kept an unknown number of notebooks, where he recorded his private thoughts and ideas, some of which would later be realized in his finished works.

It is into these notebooks that we can glimpse the artist’s mind at work, the process of working through ideas in images and words, of things that pass through the mind like “Higher Monkeys” “Spring Onions” and “The History Of The World” at the end of a list that began as “Rubber Monkey At A Buffet.” The pages of Basquiat’s notebooks string together like memories of a dream. Reading through these notebooks is like reading a diary of sorts. It’s a deeply private space that exists between the brain and the eyes. It is being inside and outside of your self at the exact same time.

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Artwork: Al Jolson, 1981. Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960–1988). Oilstick on paper; 24 x 18 in. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Estelle Schwartz, 87.47. Copyright © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, all rights reserved. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum

Artwork: Jean Michel Basquiat in his Great Jones Street studio, New York, 1987. Tseng Kwong Chi (Chinese-Canadian-American, born Hong Kong, 1950–1990). Chromogenic print; 50 x 50 in. Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York & Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, New York. © 1987 Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. New York. www.tsengkwongchi.com

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Painting

Everything You Need to Know About Standing Rock

Posted on February 9, 2017

Native Americans march to a burial ground sacred site that was disturbed by bulldozers building the Dakota Access Pipeline on September 4 near Cannon Ball, North Dakota. (Getty)

What is the latest news on the Dakota Access Pipeline?

On Tuesday, February 7, the US Army Corps of Engineers announced that it will grant the final easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) to cross the Missouri River. The Corps is skipping both the Environmental Impact Statement as well as the congressional notification period required by law. These actions have been taken in response to a Presidential Memorandum that ordered, “the acting secretary of the Army to expeditiously review requests for approvals to construct and operate the Dakota Access Pipeline in compliance with the law.”

Yesterday, members of the Senate and House Natural Resource Committees have issued a letter to the President denouncing the Trump Administration’s tactics, stating, “This blatant disregard for federal law and our country’s treaty and trust responsibilities to Native American tribes is unacceptable. We strongly oppose this decision and any effort to undermine tribal rights. We urge you to immediately reverse this decision and follow the appropriate procedures required for tribal consultation, environmental law, and due process.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Crave

The Vast Treasures of The Met Now Available in the Public Domain

Posted on February 8, 2017

Artwork: Egyptian, Fragmentary Head of a Queen, 1352-1356 B.C.E. Image provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, made about 375,000 public-domain images available for commercial and scholarly use through Open Access for anyone with a Creative Commons Zero license. This policy, which introduces partnerships with Wikimedia, Artstor, the Digital Public Library of America, Art Resource, and Pinterest, allows people from all walks of life free use of a vast range of digital images and data in from The Met’s vast history, collection, exhibitions, events, people, and activities.

Although the initiative was considered controversial when it was first introduced, as society continues to adapt itself to a digital interface, the movement to digitize and share works in the public domain has made major leaps and strides, recognizing that the open content movement is a necessity of modern life.

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Artwork: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk, 1868-69. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Categories: Africa, Art, Crave, Painting, Photography

Long Live Frederick Douglass, Man of the New Millennium

Posted on February 6, 2017

Photo: Frederick Douglass, circa 1960,s courtesy of Picture History/Wikimedia Commons.

On February 1, Donald Trump kicked off Black History Month with a breakfast meeting where he quixotically announced, “I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

The public quickly took note, wondering if the President was aware that Douglass had died in 1895 at the age of 77. Not to be missed amid the head scratching and jokes is the fact that Douglass continues to be one of the most prolific, influential Americans of our time. In recent months, his work has inspired the publication of two new books, a magazine, and an exhibition of photography and art.

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Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography