News Art Blog

According to a Pew Research study, if you count people who change from one type of Protestantism to another, “44% of American adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.” This “very competitive religious marketplace” promises to only get more competitive, as percentages of young people either unaffiliated with a faith or totally unaffiliated being even higher. Why are these people taking their faith to the marketplace? What are they looking for? Is it some kind of different or higher experience? With the stir surrounding Marina Abramović’s current performance art piece, Marina Abramović: 512 Hours at the Serpentine Gallery in London, England, being described frequently as a “religious experience,” is it possible that performance art—the most often ridiculed, poorly understood, but perhaps most vibrant art form today—could be the new religion? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Is Performance Art the New Religion?"

It’s no new news that the art world remains a man’s world for the most part, but that the situation’s getting better. Cindy Sherman’s major retrospective exhibition Cindy Sherman, which closes its run at the MOMA on June 11^th (and which I wrote about here), is a clear sign that museums are finally coming around to the idea of featuring female artists on the same scale as they’ve always featured male artists. But even a woman as officially canonized as Sherman cannot command the same auction prices as men. Her Untitled #96 (from 1981, shown above) went for nearly $4 million USD, which is nothing to scoff at, but isn’t even one fifth of what Jeff Koons was able to get for his Balloon Flower. As a recent article in The Economistshowed all too clearly, art collectors are spending bigger than ever before on post-World War II artists, but just not on post-World War II female artists. Why are art collectors still shortchanging women artists? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Why Are Art Collectors Still Shortchanging WomenArtists?"

[Image: Cindy Sherman. Untitled #96, 1981.]