Smithsonian.com

In the exhibit “Open City,” contemporary art enthusiasts celebrate graffiti, that flamboyant sign of modern times. Though subversive, graffiti can sometimes be seen as a valuable cultural artifact. Pompeii, the well-preserved ancient Roman city, still boasts Latin graffiti scratched onto its honeycombed walls. The graffiti is diverse, taking the form of jokes, political campaigns and raunchy tabloid claims. In the arena, for instance, a Bulgarian gladiator boasts of his love life: “Celadus the Thracian makes the girls sigh.”

Around 2,000 years later, in New York City, graffiti artists finally began to receive rapturous reviews from art critics. Galleries adopted Jean Michel Basquiat, with his scribbled Papua New Guinea style masks and crossed-out, puzzling words, and Keith Haring, with his playful yet political street sign figures. Tragically, these adopted darlings of the elite art world died young. (more…)

British contemporary art is sometimes mistaken for garbage—literally. In 2001, a Damien Hirst work valued in the mid six figures was, well, cleaned up by a janitor at London’s Eyestorm Gallery. Of course, Hirst’s assemblage consisted of such objects as half-filled coffee cups, cigarette butts, newspaper pages and candy wrappers scattered on the gallery floor. “It didn’t look much like art to me,” Emanuel Asare, the gallery’s cleaning man, told the London press. “So I cleared it all in bin bags, and I dumped it.”

The “bin bags” containing Hirst’s work were ultimately rescued and the piece reassembled the following day (with the addition of a “Keep Off” sign). Hirst found the whole incident funny, and Asare kept his job. (more…)

With all of the bad news in the world today—terrorism, melting ice caps, bird flu—it seems only reasonable that some artists might construct alternate worlds from their imagination. Yet such artists don’t always have to become dreamy escapists, monks or minimalists. Instead, they might confront popular fears literally, by darkening their constructed worlds with emissaries of the ominous.

Though many think of the Renaissance as an optimistic age, it too was plagued by war and natural calamity. Giotto, the Early Renaissance fresco painter, painted a stage-set Italian hill-town haunted by winged demons. Later, an aging Leonardo created rhapsodic maelstroms. His journals show billowing and flowing storms that swallowed cities and land. Though he begins with a naturalist’s eye for wind and water, soon the drawings seem visionary, even apocalyptic. Leonardo seems to sweep away any notion of humankind’s rebirth in storms of black chalk.  (more…)

Sometimes, when I go to a famous museum and enter a room that houses an iconic painting, I feel sorry for the other paintings. Take the Louvre. What other paintings are in the Mona Lisa room? Is it in a room by itself? I can’t remember seeing anything but her face, a foot-thick piece of bulletproof glass, and dozens of tiny views of her face through digital cameras that were capturing it.

I felt the same twinge when I visited the Art Institute in Chicago last week and saw Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” This was my second visit and viewing of the icon, and this time I walked past it to look at the other works in the room. Two of the other paintings in a corner of the room are Archibald Motley’s “Nightlife” and “Blues.” The reproduction does it no justice. The movement captured in “Nightlife” vibrates as you look at it. It’s an awesome piece of art, whether or not you know anything about the social or political motivations behind it. I spent five undisturbed minutes in front of it. (more…)

In dark cinemas, Hollywood monsters seem so real—think of King Kong from Peter Jackson’s recent film, drum-beating his broad chest. Though they romp and stomp with real humans, these creatures first came to life on the computer. Three dimensional modelers may see King Kong and other creatures on a black screen, their forms rendered only through a draping, glowing green web. Much like digital puppets, the 3-D models are animated, given digital textures and basked in computer-generated ambient lighting. These digital monsters seem to live and breathe.

Yet think of Mr. Tumnus, a pan-like creature from the film version of The Chronicles of Narnia. The ice queen freezes him into a sculpture. Some fine arts sculptors work like the ice queen, and first model their 3-D forms on the computer screen. Using Rapid Prototyping, lasers can read the digital mesh and cut from materials like resin to create real sculptures. Artists can choose to output their digital 3-D models to a grand size, like Michelangelo’s David, or shrink the same models to the size of toys.  (more…)