Art is a lie that makes people realize truth, Pablo Picasso once said. It is an idea epitomized by global thinkers -- painters, sculptors, architects, and filmmakers. From searing images of children doing everyday things against the backdrop of the Syrian war, to a massive sphinx made of sugar that forces an intellectual confrontation with racism in America, to a satirical installation that questions the ethics and efficacy of Western aid to Africa, the works created by these artists demand that viewers reconsider what they know to be true. A few of them are: 1. Kara Walker, 2. Maymanah Farhat, 3. Mohannad Orabi, 4. Jason Decaires Taylor, 5. Alexander Ponomarev, 6. Nadim Samman, 7. Rithy Panh, 8. Sam Hpkins, 9. Kiluanji Kia Henda, and 10. Camille Henrot. Adapted from the source document.
Art is a lie that makes people realize truth, Pablo Picasso once said. It is an idea epitomized by global thinkers -- painters, sculptors, architects, and filmmakers. From searing images of children doing everyday things against the backdrop of the Syrian war, to a massive sphinx made of sugar that forces an intellectual confrontation with racism in America, to a satirical installation that questions the ethics and efficacy of Western aid to Africa, the works created by these artists demand that viewers reconsider what they know to be true. A few of them are: 1. Kara Walker, 2. Maymanah Farhat, 3. Mohannad Orabi, 4. Jason Decaires Taylor, 5. Alexander Ponomarev, 6. Nadim Samman, 7. Rithy Panh, 8. Sam Hpkins, 9. Kiluanji Kia Henda, and 10. Camille Henrot. Adapted from the source document.
There is a place for artistic creation purely in the name of beauty: Ars gratia artis, the saying goes -- art for the sake of art. But as the Global Thinkers in this category show, art also has the power to make a striking political statement or reflect, even define, a moment in history. These artists have used brush strokes, words, images, and more to shock the senses and, in some cases, the sensibilities. They have defied the rules of artistic forms, as well as social norms of gender, race, and class. From China to Saudi Arabia, Britain to Azerbaijan, they have shown that art doesn't just matter -- it is vital. They include: 1. Haifaa Al Mansour for quietly breaking the Kingdon's gender barriers, 2. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for defying stereotypes on two continents, 3. Noviolet Bulawayo for giving voice to the 'born-free' generation, and 4. Mohsin Hamid for painting a disquieting picture of Asia's rise. Adapted from the source document.
When Ronald Reagan infamously declared the Soviet Union to be the "Evil Empire" in 1983, he was playing upon a fundamental axiom of Cold War politics: that the world can be neatly divided between the First World of Capitalism and the Second World of Communism. Equating this divide with that of good and evil only served to strengthen the notion that the two sides were mutually exclusive. Personal politics were an extension of this perspective. One was either a Capitalist or a Communist—to reject one was equivalent to embracing the other. This paper examines the art of dissident artists such as Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov, and Ilya Kabakov; artists from the Soviet Union who were exiled to the West during the Cold War. It seeks to better understand why these artists' rebellion against the Soviet system did not translate into an embrace of Western culture upon arrival in America. The roots of their critical artistic approach are interpreted through the prism of ideological nomadism which reveals their art to be deeply ambivalent. These artworks are analyzed as a disruption to the binary understanding of the Cold War and Post-Soviet eras by their embrace of a liminal position in the overlap between the capitalist and communist cultural milieus.
J.M. Coetzee made an early career out of ambivalence. Restrained and impersonal, he mined the caverns of despair from the safe distance of allegory and literary appropriation. Life and Times of Michael K, his 1983 Booker Prize winner, tracked the itinerant life of a slow-witted gardener in the sparse prose of Kafka. Foe, a work of revisionist and feminist genius, challenged the rugged masculinity of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe by inhabiting the voice of an imagined female companion. Master of Petersburg occupied not only the melancholic timbre of a Dostoevsky novelit was, after all, about the great master, but also the stilted Victorian English of a Constance Garnett translation. Adapted from the source document.
This essay outlines the formation of the Weusi Artists, begun in Harlem in 1965 as an African American artists' collective. The word Weusi translates as "blackness" in Swahili. Together the artists founded a gallery and academy of fine arts and studies, both of which became great motivating forces in the development, production, and dissemination of black art during the 1960s and 1970s.
Pierre Labrousse, Institut national des Langues et Civilisations orientales, Paris L'entrée des artistes Oil painting, despite earlier forms that can be found in Javanese craftsmanship, is a modern creation. The paramount promoter of this new type of art was Raden Saleh, who was the first painter to publicize the position of the artist. His particular way of performing his trade, in the context of colonial society and of the Yogyakarta kraton is analysed in the first part of the article. Another reason for the prestige attached to painting was found in the social origin of pre-war and independence-era artists. These generations of lesser priyayi artists were aware that the ideology of nationalism that they had taken up was a way to recover an eminent position in the new society. As new painting academies were established in universities, this trend intensified and resulted in the emergence of a new kind of power, that of discourses on painting. Regarding their relation to politics, artists were part of the prince's court under Soekarno, as well as under the New Order, although in a less personal way.
Are artists crazy? Are creators more likely to be mad, or madder, than the rest of us? Does mental distress deepen artistic vision? Correlate to genius? Is the drive to fashion a personal pictorial or plastic universe pathological? Bettina Gockel's hefty Tübingen Habilitationsschrift, "The Pathologizing of the Artist: Artist Legends in Modernity," documents the significant amount of mental energy expended exploring these and related questions from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s. Matthew Biro's The Dada Cyborg argues that the Dadaists' montages, assemblages, and raucous agitational activities in the public sphere of World War I-era Berlin indicate modernity's disruption of stable subject positions and suggest instead hybrid, "cyborgian" identities. These included challenges to normative notions of sanity, but also to those of gender, ethnicity, race, and national and political allegiance. James van Dyke's study of the Weimar- and Nazi-era career of painter Franz Radziwill, a World War I veteran and self-taught reactionary modernist realist, provides a detailed case study of an artist whom one might, in retrospect, suspect of a degree of grandiosity and careerism bordering on the pathological, but who was driven by a complex of motivations as political as they were personal.
At least since Antiquity, art and war have interfered. The most common aspect to consider is the propaganda associated with it. At the same time, artists took a stand for/against certain wars (or the concept of war) according to their personal values, beliefs, and experiences. The first part of the paper investigates how arts, war, and propaganda intertangled during the past two millennia. The Second World War, the most complex one to this date with globally diverse implications, seems to prove most how important artists are involved in times of war. This paper investigates how artists reacted to war and propaganda during the past two millennia. It includes a case study that analyzes the Russian aggression in Ukraine through the eyes of various artists. It follows how Russian, Ukrainian, and foreign artists responded to this shocking event. As expected, many Russian artists are supporting the war, on various grounds: they fear negative consequences, they believe the official perspective and propaganda, etc. Nevertheless, Russian artists – still living in Russia or who left the country immediately after the beginning of the war in Ukraine – are an important opposition voice despite the risks they take to express their views. It is even more relevant since the common political lines of action seem not to be possible in present-day Russia. As expected, most Ukrainian artists are publicly expressing their opinions against the war. Their art has benefited from wider attention than previously, especially in the EU, where many of them live as refugees of war, and in the US. The internet is, as expected, an important platform that gives voice to artists and allows the wide distribution of their work. In this facilitating framework, memes are also flourishing and getting viral, informing about and influencing attitudes to the war. The investigation also identified numerous foreign artists who took a public position, in most cases for Ukraine, especially in the first months of the war. The way artists reacted and related to the war, both on the Russian and the Ukrainian side, shows the complex relationships society and, above all, the arts have with war. In arts, as in society, war is both hated for its suffering and praised as a feat of patriotism.
This crónica is an homage to a former love, Juan Muñoz Torregrosa, whom I knew in Madrid, when I was in high school. It is a very personal piece, written shortly after I'd begun to access memories of my time with him, with the help of my sister Sarita. As I recount in the crónica, through my sister's cyber-sleuthing, we found out that Juan had become an internationally-renowned artist. Sadly, we also learnt of his untimely death in 2001. Thus, the only reconnection possible is the one I bring to life in these words, nourished by memory, eros, and imagination.