New Art Examiner Without Fear or Favor

By Pendery Weekes This issue of the New Art Examiner is unique. Nearly all of us around the world have been under some form of lock-down. Some of us have been confined to our homes, others are allowed to go out for essential food shopping, to pick up medicines at the pharmacy, or to do exercise once a day, others …

NEWS FLASH: SOTHEBY’S AND CHRISTIE’S (ET AL.) ANNOUNCE IMMEDIATE WORLDWIDE PRICE CAP OF $1M* FOR ALL WORKS OF ART, FOR ALL ERAS AND FOR ALL TIME. (*realized gain above original purchase price) Ah, what if? Think about it: an absolute cap of one million dollars (US) in a seller’s profit for any and all works of art, going back to …

by Miklos Legrady, Toronto Editor   Michel Foucault says “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and distributed” (The Discourse on Language, Dec. 2, 1970). American sociologist Herbert J. Gans writes of “gatekeepers”. Repeated complaints from peers tell us that over the last decades, academics restricted art to intellectual values, and in doing so …

by Anna Maria Benedetti in Milan On the first floor of what was once the Convent of the Humiliated, there is a permanent exhibition dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci. The presentation of this new space has recently ended after numerous interventions by authorities from the cultural, artistic and political world. The galleries are in the Leonardo da Vinci National Museum …

by Al Jirikowic, Washington DC Editor Joker, the latest film by Todd Phillips, is a work of art. All the characters carry modern American ‘allegorical weight’. They are metaphorical constructs. I saw compounded layers of inherent mental-social problems, the deft compilation of ‘mental glazes’ layered, as a fine Renaissance painting presents itself, as the actors intimated — simultaneously building cross-referential …

by Colin Fell in Cornwall Before me on my desk as I write is a thin sheet of orange plastic. It is the outline of what was, to a child growing up in England at the height of the Cold War, the known world of Europe. In our geography lessons we would place this template on our paper, and with …

by Frances Oliver I wrote recently about a just republished book from my parents’ art book collection, Saul Steinberg’s Labyrinth. Another of their books I treasure, a very different book that some might find almost unbearable to look at, is Frans Masereel’s Danse Macabre, the drawings that are his own 20th-century version of the plague-inspired medieval Dance of Death. I …

by Anita Di Rienzo, Milan.   Ancient paintings are often referred to as ‘pieces of history’, a definition which explains how a work of art acquires greater meaning, showing how we are able to historicise and exchange information through paintings. What is a painting in the end if not the only language common to all, through which it is possible …

by Sandra Zalman (reprinted with permission) Sandra Zalman is Associate Professor and Program Director of Art History at the University of Houston, where she teaches classes on modern and contemporary art, museums, and curatorial issues Her book Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism, won the 2016 SECAC Award for Excellence in Research and Publication   In a pointed assessment …

by  Katie Zazenski from Warsaw By the second week of March 2020, systems across the US began grinding to a halt, ushering in the great online migration. Much of the rest of the affected world had already begun this process, provoked by the coronavirus pandemic, which, alarming health concerns aside, has produced waves of logistical confusion and panic as we …