Smithsonian.com

Until rather recently, a look at the world’s leading artists at work would have yielded fairly similar results: self-assured, oil-painting men presiding over canvas-stacked studios, perhaps surrounded by a squad of assistants who knew how to mix the pigments just so and were quietly dispatched to take over for the master when he couldn’t be bothered to paint a subject’s hands or to perfectly render a drapery. Contemporary artists are a little more…diverse, as likely to produce a digitally-manipulated photograph of a never-ending 99-cent store (Andreas Gursky) as a tent appliquéd with a complete list of the artist’s sexual partners (Tracey Emin). (More…)

What happened to all of the scribbles, doodles, and sketches from Medieval and Renaissance times? Today artists and patrons take pride in such drawings—from brute childhood masterpieces in crayon, stuck on refrigerators everywhere, to the work of Jim Dine, who exhibits drawings and paintings with equal ease. Yet during Medieval and Renaissance times, paper was often scarce and expensive. Fledgling artists honed their craft on erasable drawing boards, each drawing as impermanent as that mysterious magic dust in an Etch-A-Sketch.  (More…)

This two-paragraph article from the AP (via the Guardian) pretty much blew my mind, even when I consider the ridiculous decadence on display in cities like Doha and Dubai. The United Arab Emirates is planning at a $25.5 billion “arts hub” for an island off the coast of Abu Dhabi. Google the island, Saadiyat, and you get this Web site. Don’t click “skip intro” unless you want to miss an ad that will remind anyone who’s seen “Children of Men” of the ersatz ad for Quietus, the Big Sleep pill. (More…)

The American Folk Art Museum has mounted Martin Ramirez’s first retrospective (Jan. 23 – April 29), and because of two glowing reviews, I will be trotting over to 53rd Street to find out why. The New Yorker and the New York Times are the reviews in question, and I believe the tastemakers have just picked a new art brut darling.Not only is this one of the “best shows of the season” according to the Times‘ Roberta Smith, but the perennially unimpressed, better-at-everything-than-you-or-I-will-ever-be New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl declares Ramírez “my favorite outsider artist. Come to that, he’s one of my favorite artists, period.” (More…)