ARTES MAGAZINE

  There will be no ruins of Las Vegas. Everything of its previous history is absolutely erased by design. Nothing will be left to uncover, as David Macaulay did in his post-apocalyptic comic, Motel of the Mysteries, which imagined a Howard Carter-like excavation of a roadside motor lodge.      What seemed absolutely contemporary in 1968, when [...]

Our minds become numb and our eyes glaze over as the harsh reality of yet another natural tragedy in the world enters the corner of our visual field. Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, has once again been devastated by disaster. Having the misfortune to be built over one the many tectonic faults [...]

E.H. Gombrich’s, The Story of Art, famously begins with the thought that, “There is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” Contemporary art has indeed fulfilled Gombrich’s prescience and insight with a somewhat sorrowful consequence, probably unforeseen when first published in 1950. The past half century has birthed an art in which [...]

x In a 1999 New York Times report on museum attendance for the previous decade, increases of 20% were reported in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Based on a survey by The Art Newspaper, blockbuster exhibits by the likes of Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin and Winslow Homer’s private collection drew thousands of eyes and millions [...]

OPINION POLL: It is an indomitable part of the human spirit to find hope in despair; a reason to keep believing when people and causes we once believed in are no longer there- when the footing of our comfortable existence appears to shift with the unsettling suddenness and violence of an earthquake. The global events [...]

   OPINION POLL: “Time Will Tell: Ethics and Choices in Conservation” Through September 6, 2009  Yale University Art Gallery  1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut  artgallery.yale.edu  What might happen to Dorian Gray’s portrait after the story ends? Decayed by age, it has experienced the ultimate restoration, having been returned to a pristine original state by [...]