Kaywin Feldman and the National Gallery of Art Girl Scouts Entering the Kaywin Feldman National Gallery of Art, East Building, that crooked, unfriendly museum that hides art in closets and exposes visitors to a Piranesi-like prison, you will notice two little light-boards near a gaping bulwark beneath a threatening metal sheet along an ominous…
Picturing Realism What is real, the painting of the bowl of fruit, or the bowl of fruit. Is the mountain more real than the painting of the mountain? Is the man real, or is the painting of the man real, or are both real, or neither? If you guessed, “neither”, you might be correct….
ARCHITECTURAL .ART Architecture is an art, a craft, a practical necessity. Sometimes, architecture is man’s grandeur writ large: Saint Peter’s Basilica, The Parthenon, Taj Mahal, Le Mont-Saint-Michel, The Pantheon. Sometimes architecture is foolishness scribbled everywhere: The Guggenheim, Dancing House, Niterói Contemporary, Le Centre Pompidou, The Gherkin. Lately, the art of architecture has been an absurdity…
You will notice the all-to-obvious differences between the Classive stacked-stone of Athens’ Acropolis and the Progressive stone-stacks teetering all around us. The one is permanent, ennobling, difficult, the other is transient, degrading, all-too-easy and ethically squishy. Picture, if you will, the intelligence of Athens’ Propylaea, the idea in stone, the divine geometries, the artistry in…
Equity Diversity Inclusion: Firmness, Commodity, and Slight of Phrase “Equity diversity inclusion” is a pretty little phrase, quaint, nice and polite, well suited to swimsuit contests, campus riots, and advertising campaigns. We find this fawning phrase graphicly projected on smart boardroom screens, carelessly taped to smudgy coffeehouse windows, and boldly italicized upon preachy university…
William Girard: Classive Artist Likely, the universe was made by mind, the God, if you will, if not, no matter, nothing at all. Before matter, information: before anything is made, idea, alike the programmer who enters code, alike the mechanic who conceives an engine, before all creation there is information, an idea which has…
The National Gallery of Art Petting Zoo Here we are on the Acropolis, in the picture gallery, the Pinakotheke, looking from the Propylaea to John Russell Pope’s National Gallery of Art. What a view, 5,125 miles and farther in time, 2,500 years, the distance between Phidias, Pericles, Plato, and you. What a view. Over…
Perhaps your school-desk was alike my school-desk covered edge-to-edge in sketches. The desk surface, as you know, is an almost perfect blank canvas, a clean slate, a tabula rasa*, of sorts, where knowledge acquired might be reflected eye to mind to hand, to nun who might correct wayward drawing knuckles with a smart, wood-ruler, snap,…
