ARTES MAGAZINE

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” ~Charles Baudelaire “Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall [...]

“Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.” ~Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) The sixteenth century marked the dawn of a new age of inquiry, understood by many as the earliest beginnings of the modern age. Religious fervor, superstition and broadly-held, ancient views of [...]

   “The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.”  —Willem de Kooning They say that autumn is the time when the boundary between the living and the [...]

Editor’s Note: Here, Ken Yellis’ analysis of the museum world gains particular currency in today’s political climate: because, most recently, on Saturday, October 8, 2011, the National Air and Space Museum in Washington was closed after anti-war demonstrators swarmed the building to protest a drone exhibit. Security guards used pepper spray to repel them, sickening [...]

As a treat and a belated birthday present, I was fortunate enough to go to New York City Comic Con, one of the East Coast’s largest ‘popular culture’ events, including some of the best-known comic and graphic novel artists, and my favorite– anime and manga characters. The editor of ARTES e-magazine arranged press passes for [...]

Something about Stamford, Connecticut, invites repeating Gertrude Stein’s comment that “There’s no there there.” But Stein was looking for a childhood home that had vanished, and not expecting to invent a cliché for anyplace that was without the trace of a past. What is to be made of this invented landscape, fundamentally disconnected from the [...]

This survey of work by London-based, Israeli-born artist Ori Gersht (b. 1967), brought together for the first time, his trilogy of films based on 17th and 18th century still life paintings from 2006 to 2008, along with related still images that he enlarged into photographs (and his first solo exhibition in the western U.S., at [...]

“Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.”  ~Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species “The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the [...]

On view through spring, 2012, the Philadelphia Museum of Art features a unique exhibition, Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion. This show includes furniture and design objects in a space entirely transformed by the prominent female architect. The fluid, site-specific installation is the first of its kind in the United States, assembled by a team of [...]

The Dramatic Influence of Japanese Ukiyo-e  Prints on Impressionist Painting From the word orient, we take our meaning, ‘to establish a direction or a path based on the points of the compass’. Navigators over centuries faced east to trace the path of the rising sun to its apex for the noon sextant sighting—toward the Orient—the [...]