a blind flaneur

Sculptor Louise Bourgeois died today at age 98 in New York City, reports NPR/Associated Press.

Marina Abramovic, the self-styled grandmother of performance art has become the first performance artist to be awarded a major retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Over the years the Serbian artist has starved herself, incised five point stars into her stomach, whipped herself and come very very close to dying in mid-performance. Today her work is increasingly meditative in style but continues to explore an equation of endurance, empathy and energy. The Strand’s Mark Coles talks to her biographer, James Westcott about an artist who lives her art more than most – right now she is in lock-down mode as she attempts her latest 600 hour marathon performance.

The work takes on an existence of its own … Emin at the White Cube Gallery. Photograph: [Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images/Guardian]
Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones reviews Those Who Suffer Love and concludes that
Tracey Emin is far from a narcissist because her depictions of sex and suffering draw on “honest truth”:

It’s as if Egon Schiele [...]

What I like most about the BBC is the surrealism that surrounds listening to it in the middle of the night. My local public radio station broadcasts the BBC World Service in the wee hours. If I wake up then I flip on the clock radio and let suave, cultured radio voices on the other [...]

Grant Wood. Parson Weem’s’ Fable. 1939. Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth.
When I was five years old, before I learned to read, I laid claim to a book in the family library called Pictorial History of American Presidents. It covered the course from George to  Ike, who still held office then, and it was loaded with [...]

Rusalka by Russian artist Konstantin Vasiliev, 1968. [Source: Wikipedia]
Ms. Modigliani found this image while searching for clips of the Song to the Moon aria from Dvo?ák’s Rusalka. According to Wikipedia:
In Slavic mythology, a rusalka (plural:rusalki) was a female ghost, water nymph, succubus or mermaid-like demon that dwelled in a waterway.
According to most traditions, the rusalki [...]

Mahalia Jackson soars in a performance photograpghed by Lee Friedlander. [Source: NPR]
Once upon a time, I ran as fast as I could to get away from Holiday Muzak at the shopping mall. One of my earliest newspaper columns railed against the psychotropic effects of hearing “Jingle Bell Rock” twenty times a day. I risk convulsions [...]

One of this year’s MacArthur Foundation Fellows, recipients of the so-called “genius grants,” is San Francisco sound artist Walter Kitundu. His kinetic sculptures have a whimsical elegance reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp, and his musical instruments sound as earthy and iconoclastic as Harry Partch with a hip-hop twist. He uses old turntables as part of the [...]

Le Saut dans le Vide (“Leap into the Void”) is a photograph of an art performance by Yves Klein at Rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, in October 1960. [Photo by by Harry Shunk/Wikipedia]
I made the comment yesterday that “Philippe Petit isn’t a daredevil like Evel Knievel, but a performance artist like Yves Klein.” I thought immediately of [...]

Actually, a digital representation can only approximate the deep, other-worldly hue of the color known as IKB or International Klein Blue. Invented by French artist Yves Klein, IKB now has its own Wikipedia page:
International Klein Blue (or IKB as it is known in art circles) was developed by French artist Yves Klein as part of [...]