New Art Examiner Without Fear or Favor

Gill Fickling Do not watch this film if you are on the verge of committing yourself, or being committed, to an old people’s home. It will make you inclined to fall on your sword instead. That being said, if you feel like a good laugh followed by a good cry, then this is the film for you. A quirky documentary …

Mary Fletcher I had not thought there was a connection between the work of Doig and Munch, but it seems Peter Doig consciously gave his picture Echo Lake similarities to the background in Edvard Munch’s Ashes. There is a similar use of swishy shapes of paint and horizontal bands of composition. There’s a similar sort of intensity and memorable imagery. …

Phillip Barcio Michael Joo’s latest solo exhibition at Chicago’s Kavi Gupta gallery is perfectly tailored to our time: exclusive and a little alienating, just like pandemic viewing restrictions. Climbing the dimly lit stairway to the second-floor exhibition space by myself, my feelings of strange solitude were amplified by the sounds of soft, incomprehensible whisperings emanating from an unseen audio installation. …

Susana Gómez Laín They seek him here, they seek him there Those Frenchies seek him everywhere Is he in heaven or is he in hell? That damned elusive Pimpernel Baroness Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel With him/her/them (we don’t know yet), in a context of pandemia, scandal arrived at the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts Circle) in Madrid out …

Mary Fletcher I am watching Question Time, which during the Covid crisis presents us with a wall of zoomed members of the public. I am trying to draw the speakers. What strikes me is how very different men and women look. The men all wear a uniform of suit, shirt and tie if on the panel; those in the audience …

Rachel Harrison Blake Gopnik wrote on Facebook that  Rachel Harrison’s work “inhabits the art world with zero friction. It ticks every box for what art is supposed to look like and be and do”. FACEPALM!   TI’d say  Rachel Harrison has no idea what art is, like  so many artists who graduate from the university of conformity. Art historian and critic …

Otto Dix: Objective Painter or accidental prophet? Darius Magada-Ward Death is Black and White Anthony Viney Don Kimes interviewed by Barbara rose Barbara Rose The marvel-ous future of cinema Scott Winfield Sublett The virtual outdoors Pendery Weekes Four epidemics Frances Oliver Letters Editorial Pendery Weekes, Cornwall Speakeasy Daniel Nanavati: “The Eye That is Not an Eye” Poem Josephine Gardiner: “Treecreeper” …

An Invitation When the roaring twenties finally do arrive, as predicted after the rerun of the Spanish flu era comes to an end, we need to be ready to embrace the changes that will have taken place during our absence from society and make way for new scenarios. It could be positive, and it could bring great renewal, also to …

“… I look upon that inward eye That is the bliss of solitude…” A famous quote, though some scholars believe the sentence of which this is a part was actually suggested by Dorothy, not William, Wordsworth. But the inward eye, that part of our brains that plays with images and re-imagines what we have seen, has been the topic of …

Anthony Viney If you have ever printed from a black-and-white film negative, you will have experienced seeing a photographic image gradually appear on white paper and, if left in the chemical bath long enough, disappear into darkness. To see something appear out of nothing and evolve towards nothing is to experience transience. Feelings of transience are a significant presence in …

Republished with permission from Artscope, December 11, 2020 This is the last interview Barbara Rose conducted. I met Don Kimes in the Nineties and have watched his work develop and change over time in response to both personal and artistic challenges. We have had an ongoing dialogue ever since. Recently I saw the work he is including in his exhibition …

Scott Winfield Sublett Earlier this year I bought as much as I could afford of pandemic-depressed Disney stock at $101. I’m a university professor, so… not much. But if it gets down to 101 again, which it won’t, buy, buy, buy, because the future is written and Disney owns it. Their domination of world culture through gobbling up folk tales …

Pendery Weekes Just as depicted in the virtual life platform Second Life (https://secondlife.com/), launched in 2003 and still going strong, today we too are living our own second lives online, doing just about everything imaginable in front of our screens. In Second Life people can “discover incredible experiences, fascinating people, and vibrant communities in this vast virtual world”. Second lifers …

Frances Oliver There have been several epidemics in my lifetime – among them SARS, Ebola, AIDS, Swine Flu, Bird Flu – but here I will mention only those that, though they did not make me ill, in one respect or another changed my life. The first was polio. When I was a child there was as yet no vaccine and …

Susana Gómez Laín After having my temperature tested, my hands washed in hydro-alcohol and my mask well adjusted I entered, full of joy and hope after a series of lockdowns. The exhibition “Invitadas” (invited) at the Prado Museum is an event procrastinated and yearned for, wrongly expected to be of a radical feminism. It not only showcases the works of …