by Jeanne Willette | Nov 23, 2012 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture, Modern Philosophy
AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART AND ARTISTS The Harlem Renaissance To ask the question: what is African-American art? is to ask what is American art? America is a nation of immigrants. The only “American” culture is that of the Native Americans and, ironically, as...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 16, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
CHICANO HISTORY AND HERITAGE “We are a Brown People with a Bronze Culture” Part Three In asking the question what is Chicano art, one is inevitably asking another question what is art? Chicano art did not fit into the white Western mainstream definition of...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 16, 2012 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
Norman Rockwell, Part One Although the career of Norman Rockwell, the acclaimed illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post, spanned the twentieth century, his mature period of the 1940s and 1950s is the best known. This podcast, the first of three, discusses how this...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 9, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
CHICANO ARTISTS and POPULAR CULTURE Part Two Chicano Art and Chicano artists are, definitionally, part of a political culture of outsiders, people of color, individuals who were crudely grouped into an inaccurate and racist designation “illegal aliens.”...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 2, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
CHICANO ARTISTS AS OUTSIDER ARTISTS What separates Chicano art from mainstream art and from the artists of color who have “made it” in the white art world, such as Bryan Kim, is that the Chicano artists did not want to be part of the white mainstream art world. ...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 26, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
Native American Art and Contemporary Issues The famous IAIA, the Institute of American Indian Art, was founded in 1962 as a counterweight to the Santa Fe School and its artificial construction of “Indian art.” In contrast to those who preserve ancient...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 19, 2012 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
Pablo Picasso, Part Four For decades one of the most famous and iconic works of modern art was mis-placed, waiting in New York City for the Spanish Republic to return. Predicting the horrors of the Second World War, Guernica had a potency and power that lingered long...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 19, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
NATIVE AMERICAN ART AND ARTISTS The “art world”—based in New York—was defined by exclusion: the exclusion of women, people of color, and certain kinds of art making. “Craft” is not considered “fine art,” and it is interesting to note that craft is often...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 12, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
POSTMODERNISM IN PHOTOGRAPHY Photography became the postmodern art form par excellence, taking the place of painting when the Modernist precepts of European art became exhausted by the 1960s. Unlike painting, photography did not have to grapple with and overcome a...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 5, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
DOUBLE CODING IN PAINTING The Return of the Repressed In the 1980s, painting, once declared “dead,” long, the repressed Other of Conceptual Art, “returned.” The “return” of painting could not have happened without the supposed death of the avant-garde and the...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 28, 2012 | Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
The Postmodern Condition and the International Art Market Neo-Expressionism was an international style and Postmodern painting was big money. Big painting had returned and the buyers had the big money to pay for it. Art collecting in the 1980s was nothing less than...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 21, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Criticism, Contemporary Culture, Contemporary Philosophy, Postmodern
The Masters of Postmodernism Postmodern architecture is a generational Oedipal act of rebellion against the Modernist fathers. Beginning with early criticisms of Modernist destruction of traditional cities, from the 1970s a genuine rebellion broke out among younger...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 14, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE In America, Postmodernism, as an art form, was first manifested in architecture, arriving as a new discourse about architecture as early as the 1960s. It is important to note that this discourse was architectural and not philosophical,...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 14, 2012 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
Pablo Picasso, Part Three Much has been written about Picasso’s masterwork, Guernica, and most of the art historical accounts focus on the iconography and the style of the mural. This podcast examines the meaning of the mural within the cultural context of the...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 7, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Contemporary Philosophy, Postmodern
Mannerism and Symbolism in Architecture Robert Venturi began his famous book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, with a “gentle manifesto” for what he called “Nonstraightforward Architecture.” The young architect stated, I like...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 31, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
THE PAST IS PRESENT Nostalgia and Retro Art Postmodernism is a time period, beginning at a number of points, depending upon which criteria one is using. Noting the post-Duchampian works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, one could select 1955 as a starting...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 24, 2012 | Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Contemporary Philosophy, Postmodern
POSTMODERNISM: THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Part Two Defining Postmodernism is a difficult process. Even though it is now fashionable to declare Postmodernism as “dead” or “over,” one should proceed with caution before burying the body. Unlike...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 17, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Modern Philosophy, Postmodern
POSTMODERNISM: THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Part One Writing in the second volume of his important book, A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee attempted to describe the moment/s in which the “Modern” ended and the “Post-Modern” began. He asserted,...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 17, 2012 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
Pablo Picasso, Part Two Few artists were as renowned for their appetites for women as Pablo Picasso. The paintings of his middle years were veritable diaries of conquest. This podcast presents the women in Picasso’s life – Olga, Marie-Thérèse and Dora Maar – and...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 10, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
CHARACTERISTICS From “Either/Or” to “Both/And” In Europe Postmodernism was a serious expression of the agony that follows the loss of hope, but in America, Postmodernism was understood in a far more shallow fashion, as a rejection of the...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 3, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
THE DEFINITION OF POSTMODERNISM The End of History “Postmodernism” was a term coined in 1939 by Arnold Toynbee early in the twentieth century to refer to the last quarter of the 19th century, a time where capitalism and imperialism and Western...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 27, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Criticism, Postmodern
HOW THE AVANT-GARDE DIED When the theorists of the avant-garde wrote of the avant-garde movements and works of art, whether Renato Poggioli in 1968 or Renato Poggioliin 1984, it was from a historical perspective, in the past tense. The question is what killed the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 20, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Criticism, Postmodern
HOW OBJECTS BECOME “ART” In writing The Artworld, art writer and philosopher, Arthur Danto, laid out a history of how art history had to change its theories of what art was supposed to be in the face of new objects. He said, “Suppose one thinks of...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 19, 2012 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
Pablo Picasso, Part One Although we accept Picasso as one of the great artists of the twentieth century, he was not born a famous artist, he was “made.” This podcast discusses the role of the Great War and the creation of the post-war market in buying and...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 13, 2012 | Contemporary Culture, Modern Philosophy, Philosophy
SIMONE-ERNESTINE-LUCIE-MARIE BERTRAND de BEAUVOIR (1908 – 1986) One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Longtime companion to Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir was the other half of France’s glamour couple of the Left Bank. Both philosophers were...
