Alas, Damien Hirst
Everything Damien Hirst touches turns to hype. Would he be half as well liked or despised without his carnival of publicity? Much of what has been written about Hirst is…
Author Stephen Persing
Stephen Persing
Stephen Persing is a writer and blogger whose writing has appeared in Art in America, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and might be found semi-regularly in his blog, at http://artnote.blog.com.
The Orphan’s Friend
I spent the latter half of my childhood in a small town in eastern Connecticut. Once it had been strictly rural, but by the latter half of the twentieth-century was…
Visible Cities
Everyone wants to live somewhere else, and, much of the time, we do just that. We edit our perceptions, wreathing a place in nostalgic associations or turning a blind eye…
Botero’s Abu Ghraib
My first question is: Why Botero? How did this mild, sometimes trivial artist become the chronicler of darkness? At age 73 Fernando Botero broke out of his benign reputation with…
Rain Rain Go Away: Falo Blu
The Westerly Public Library, in Westerly RI, resonates with old money and civic virtue, both of which can seem as quaint and bygone as the dinosaurs. It’s a mansion-sized…
Three Painters: Bodies and Soul
SOMEWHERE IN DREAMLAND Looking at Will Cotton’s paintings remind me of cartoons; or one cartoon in particular. The Fleischer Studios Color Classic cartoon Somewhere In Dreamland (1936) is the epitome…
Art At The Cusp: Manifest.AR
There can be no art revolution that is separate from a science revolution, a political revolution, an education revolution, a drug revolution, a sex revolution, or a personal revolution .…