New Art Examiner Without Fear or Favor

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 …

by Ben Russo in Holland   Infection, virus, asymptomatic, remote, and assembly are continuously heard in official communications, by the media, and in our everyday dialogue, placing them among the most sought-after and fashionable words to be used at the moment. In a not so distant past, as heard in Europe and other parts of the world a century earlier, …

by Alexander Stanfield, West Coast Editor (USA) If I were to ask you, what is a museum, no matter what your answer is, the more pressing inquiry is what is the function of a museum? What role or responsibility does a museum have to the community it engages with mentally or emotionally? The actual definition of ‘museum’ is more complicated …

(with European Editor Daniel Nanavati, conducted over Skype)   You obviously always wanted to be an artist? DN: Yes. When I was in high school, I graduated in the 70s, back then I was told that there wasn’t very much money and we had one boy and three girls. So if someone was going to go to college it was …