Bookworm Room

I blame two things for the current state of modern art: the camera and the denigration of faith. When art was both the sole way to record this life and the most reverent way to pay homage to faith and the after life, artists brought their best efforts to play, and both buyers and viewers [...]

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Back in December, I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (“LACMA”) to see an exhibit entitled “Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915.”  Historic European and American fashion has always been something of a hobby of mine, so I was excited when I first heard about the exhibit.  I wasn’t disappointed.  The [...]

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One of my all time favorite books is Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. In it, Fussell looks at the World War I through the eyes of the hyper-literate soldier poets and writers whose names we still recognize today: Rupert Brooks, who died before his fellow literary artists began to realize that the [...]

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There’s what I consider an intentionally funny story today about a radio station afraid of reading Howl on the air because it’s afraid it might run afoul of FCC rules governing broadcasting: Fifty years ago today, a San Francisco Municipal Court judge ruled that Allen Ginsberg’s Beat-era poem “Howl” was not obscene. Yet today, a [...]

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A few weeks ago, I did a “what is art” post. Aaron Johnson, an artist who uses a cartoon panel for social commentary at What The Duck, must have caught that post, because he was kind enough to send me a link to today’s cartoon. I have to say, “by George, I think he’s got [...]

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Frankly, I don’t care if this is art.  I think it’s wonderful.  As someone who never got past drawing a square or two on my Etch-a-Sketch, I was awestruck by what Jeff Gagliardi has done with the same medium.

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In the old days — pre-camera — I think that it was pretty easy to answer when asked “What is art?”.  Art served four major purposes: to elevate God, to aggrandize the rich and powerful, to decorate spaces, and to record images in a pre-photographic era. Some stuff was good, some stuff was awful. The [...]

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