In honor of Kehinde Wiley’s new presidential portrait, please enjoy this repost of my article considering him as an exemplar of Reconstructivist Art, originally published not long after his Columbus Museum of Art show in[…]
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Category: Art
Presidential Portraits
Everything President Obama has done since first taking office has been viewed with particular scrutiny, and his and Michelle’s selection of portraitists was no exception. Each took the opportunity provided to raise the profile of[…]
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Stevie Wonder: Philosophical Music
It occurred to me recently that in my survey of philosophical music I had too long overlooked perhaps the premiere philosopher of transcendent pop music, Mr. Stevland Wonder (an artist I had the exquisite pleasure[…]
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Does Jay-Z’s 4:44 Live Up to Beyonce’s Lemonade?
Following the artistic leap forward represented by his wife’s album, Lemonade, it was a necessity for Sean “Jay-Z” Carter, AKA “Mr. Beyonce,” to respond with something that could reasonably be placed next to it on[…]
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Reconstructivist Art: The Princess Bride
to reawaken a sense of the Real in a world where everything has been demonstrated to be an illusion
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Reconstructivist Art: Smooth Criminal
In honor of Michael Jackson’s birthday this week, please enjoy this essay about his song, Smooth Criminal, considered as an exemplar of Reconstructivist Art. Michael Jackson’s hit single Smooth Criminal is an object lesson in[…]
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Caroline, or Change
When I went to see what turned out to be an extraordinary production of the Broadway musical Caroline, or Change (playwright Tony Kushner, composer Jeanine Tesori) I wasn’t sure what to expect. I remembered reading[…]
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Soichi Sunami: Modern Artist
I always knew that my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, was an unusual person. Born in 1885, fifteen years before the end of the nineteenth century, he was an early Japanese immigrant[…]
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Reconstructivist Art: Every Day the Same Dream
I’m not usually one to rave about a video game, but this simple, easy to play , quick to complete game changed my entire evaluation of the potential of video games as an art form. A dark, existential humanist parable about an office drone, the game uses a severely limited set of options and locations as a strength rather than a weakness
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Wiley Reconsidered
A Response to the Toledo Art Museum Retrospective My first encounter with the work of artist Kehinde Wiley was in 2006, when the Columbus Museum of Art commissioned his first significant museum show. At the[…]
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