The new Semester has (already!) started here at Ohio State and I am teaching a class called Classical Mythology/Contemporary Art. Now, unlike many of the essays in the illuminating recent volume of essays on this topic – Isabelle Loring Wallace and Jennie Hirsh (eds) Contemporary Art and Classical Myth (Ashgate, 2011) – my course is […]
In the Spring, I recorded a podcast for the Philadelphia Museum of Art about Cy Twombly’s Classicism. The first half is a talk based on the introduction I delivered at the American Philological Association Annual Meeting in January for a panel I put together called Abstracting Classics: Cy Twombly, Modern Art and the Ancient World […]
The Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius, in his De rerum natura (‘On the Nature of Things’) introduces a discussion (and refutation) of Empedocles’ theory of the Four Elements (or Roots) – Earth, Water, Fire, Air – with a description of his predecessor’s homeland of Sicily (DRN 1. 716-725). David Sedley in his book Lucretius and the Transformation […]
Just before New Year 1932, Walker Evans (1903-1975), the iconic American photographer, set sail to Tahiti on a luxury schooner called the Cressida. Walker Evans Portrait of a Woman, Tahiti 1932, silver print, ca. 1930s, 6 1/2 x 9 1/4. www.leegallery.com In letters sent from there, and on his return a few months later, Evans recounts […]
It is quite easy to show that abstract art like every other cultural phenomenon reflects the social and other circumstances of the age in which its creators live… …realistic space cracks and splinters into flat planes which come forward, parallel to the plane surface… Clement Greenberg ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ (1940) It is all well […]
A two-part exhibition opened yesterday in Frankfurt called Jeff Koons: The Painter & The Sculptor – the former in the Schirn Kunsthalle and the latter in the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, until September 23rd. In both exhibitions, Koons offers his most sustained engagement with Classical Art to date with the his most recent work: the three-part Antiquity […]
A few weeks ago I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art and, although I had been there recently – in January for an event I organized based on the Fifty Days at Iliam (1978) series by Cy Twombly (below) -, on this visit, I had more time and so I finally had a chance to […]
I have recently returned from a whirlwind trip to Marfa, Texas – the home of the Chinati Foundation created by Donald Judd as a permanent site for his own work and that of, among others, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, David Rabinowitch and Ilya Kabakov. I am currently writing my next post about my visit, but […]
For today, a post disguised as a question: What is the connection between Ovid’s Medea and Richard Prince’s The Comedy Dungeon? Answers on a postcard. For more about Richard Prince, visit: http://www.richardprince.com/
American artist and activist Paul Chan’s Phaedrus Pron, a ‘hyper-translation’ of Plato’s Phaedrus, is worth looking at. Here are thirteen ways you can get into it: 1. You can watch the trailer (yes, this book has a trailer): ****Viewer Discretion Is Advised**** 2. You can listen to Chan reading an excerpt for you and here […]