by Jeanne Willette | Jul 6, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
ART AND FEMINISM According to Lee Krasner, the art world in New York in the late 1930s was an egalitarian place. Discrimination arrived in the persons of the French Surrealists, renowned misogynists, who considered women to be children or muses. In the 1940s, the few...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 29, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Postmodern
THE IMPACT OF FEMINIST ART To examine the impact of feminist art upon mainstream art is to examine the long list of what was excluded or forbidden in the art world. For those outside this world, artists appear to be daring avant-garde experimenters, but nothing could...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 22, 2012 | Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
MODERN FEMINISM The Historical Context Modern feminism is essentially a product of the emancipation of women during the Second World War. Women were once again called into the work force but for a longer period of time and over a greater part of the population than...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 15, 2012 | Contemporary Culture, Modern
FEMINIST ART Part One Voices of the Other “…one is not born, but rather one becomes a woman…its is civilization as a whole that produces this creature…” Simone de Beauvoir What is “feminism?” What is “Feminist Art History?” What is “Feminist Art?” From the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 8, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Postmodern
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONCEPTUAL ART PART TWO “Art is art. Everything else is everything else.” Ad Reinhardt The artist, Joseph Kosuth, insisted that Conceptual Art was a child of the 1960s, not the Civil Rights sixties, not the Stonewall sixties, not the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 1, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Postmodern
THE PHILOSOPHY OF MINIMAL ART PART ONE To discuss the relationships of artists to any particular philosopher or to discuss the relationship of any work of art to philosophy is to enter upon dangerous ground. First, artists are not philosophers. They may study...
by Jeanne Willette | May 25, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Postmodern
ART AS IDEA—IDEA AS ART At mid-century, the question of what is art? was raised again for the first time since Emmanuel Kant wrote the Critique of Judgment in 1781. Starting in the mid-fifties, Neo-Dada art and Minimal Art challenged the presumed Modernist...
by Jeanne Willette | May 18, 2012 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
NEW DEAL ART AND ARTISTS In the decades before local community museums were common, New Deal art was, for many communities, the only access to art. Although often disparaged as being too “folksy,” New Deal murals were only one part of an extensive...
by Jeanne Willette | May 18, 2012 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
ART OF THE ENVIRONMENT One of the last important “movements,” Earth Art or Environmental Art or Land Art, was an inevitable extension of Minimal Art and Process Art. Combining elements of both movements, Earth Art moved art out of the galleries and museums, often...
by Jeanne Willette | May 11, 2012 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
ART AS PROCESS Definition When the peripatetic artist, Robert Morris, abandoned his hollow gray wooden Minimal objects and pinned to the wall a cascade of felt folding itself into resplendent labial folds relaxing into a pool of material on the floor, the art world...
by Jeanne Willette | May 4, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Postmodern
OBJECTS AND THE GESTALT IN MINIMAL ART The Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1966 made official the existence of a new art movement, Minimalism. As would be the case in identifying any new trend, the collection of artworks and which artists were...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 27, 2012 | Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Criticism, Postmodern
THE DIALECTICS OF MINIMALISM AS DISCOURSE Part Two As an art movement, Minimalism was one of the first to attempt to establish its own art writing and its artists attempted to assert themselves against the art critics. By the mid-sixties, cracks in the edifice of...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 20, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Postmodern
MINIMAL ART AS ART/NOT ART Part One “Installation Art” is an all-inclusive term encompassing performance art and public and and art exhibitions in which the objects and the way they are displayed are dependent upon the particular space and the presence of the...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 13, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
ART AS EVENT Compared to the brief flash of the Happenings in New York City, in Europe, Performance Art was a far more important part of the post war experience for artists in Germany and France. Many of the European artists re-connected with the old Dada spirit,...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 13, 2012 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
THE STORY OF ART UNDER THE NEW DEAL Long ignored and often neglected, the art made during the New Deal was far more impactful for American art than is usually realized. For the first time, the American government supported artists and art through a number of programs...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 6, 2012 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
THE HAPPENINGS: AN INTERACTION OF ART AND LIFE The so-called “drip” paintings of Jackson Pollock may have “broken the ice,” as Willem de Kooning put it, and put American art on the map, but the most lasting legacy of the artist was not his...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 30, 2012 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
EURO POP American art history has tended to assume that something called “Pop Art” existed in Europe and has introduced a select group of European artists as examples. However, only London wholeheartedly embraced American popular culture, while other...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 23, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
WHAT WAS POP ART? Before it was anything else, Pop Art was American…and white…and urban….and male…and middle class…and straight. Pop Art was about affluence, about money and all the things that the middle class white male could afford to...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 16, 2012 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
DEFINING ART AS POPULAR CULTURE DEFINING POPULAR CULTURE AS ART Introduction “A walk down 14th street is more amazing than any masterpiece of art,” commented Allan Kaprow, a Pop artist in New York. This statement sums up what Pop Art was reacting to and...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 16, 2012 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
WHY DID THE ARTISTS “SELL OUT?” Long sequestered and rarely viewed, recent art historical writings have begun to examine the art of Fascism. This series of podcasts, in four parts, attempts to answer a series of questions: what were the goals of Nazi art,...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 9, 2012 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
GUTAI 1950-1960 PERFORMANCE ART IN JAPAN Gutai Art does not alter the material. Gutai Art imparts life to the material. Gutai Art does not distort the material. In Gutai Art, the human spirit and the material shake hands with each other, but keep their distance. The...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 2, 2012 | Contemporary Philosophy, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Culture, Postmodern
THEODOR ADORNO (1903-1969) AND IDENTITY Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote their critique of the culture of Western civilization, Dialectic of Enlightenment during the Second World War. When the book was published in German in 1947, the full extent of the...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 24, 2012 | Modern Aesthetics, Modern Culture, Postmodern
THEODOR ADORNO (1903-1969) AND THE CULTURE INDUSTRY Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) was born in the sun of Hollywood, beside the pools of Santa Monica, in the capital of mass culture designed to entertain and to (literally) stupefy the American public. It would...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 17, 2012 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
NAZI SCULPTURE Long sequestered and rarely viewed, recent art historical writings have begun to examine the art of Fascism. This series of podcasts, in four parts, attempts to answer a series of questions: what were the goals of Nazi art, who were the Nazi artists –...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 17, 2012 | Modern Art, Postmodern
JASPER JOHNS (1930 –) When Jasper Johns left his native South Carolina for the mean streets of New York, he claimed to have arrived at his Pearl Street Studio knowing nothing about art history. In fact, he later destroyed some of his early work when he realized...
