News Art Blog

The 70^th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will undoubtedly be accompanied by images of the “mushroom clouds” that rose over both cities. Terrible and sublime, these images burned themselves into the consciousness of “the greatest generation” and every generation since that’s lived with both the legacy of nuclear war and the reality of nuclear energy. A new exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, titled Camera Atomica, looks deeply at the interrelated nature of photography and nuclear war and peace to come away with a fascinating glimpse of the calculatedly manufactured “atomic sublime” — the fascination with such terrible power at our command that simply won’t let us look away. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Atomic Sublime: How Photography Shapes our View of Nuclear Warfare and Energy."

Every election comes with questions, ranging from the serious (How will we fix the economy?) to the ludicrous (Was he born in this country?). But this election season, artist Barbara Kruger is asking the open-ended questions that this election (and every election) must answer in her exhibition Belief+Doubt at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Using her standard modus operandi of larger-than-lifesize text, Kruger grabs your attention at the very moment that attention must be paid in America. Although Kruger is asking these questions, the real question might be whether we are ready to answer them. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How HoHoBarbaraKruger Asks the Questions This Election Must Answer."



[Many thanks to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, for providing me with the image above and other press materials related to Barbara Kruger’s exhibition Belief+Doubt, which runs through December 31, 2014.]

If “LA MoCA” sounds to you like something you’d order from Starbucks, than you probably don’t know anything about the recent kerfuffle surrounding what is being called the murder of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Like any great murder mystery, this one features plenty of high-profile suspects—some physically present, others purely metaphorically. The fact remains that the MoCA’s severely, if not fatally, wounded by the forced resignations of curators, subsequent resignations of artists on the board of trustees, bad reviews of questionably designed exhibitions, and the highly questionable conflicts of interest surrounding former (and possibly present by proxy) art dealer turned MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch. As sad as the current state of what was once known as “the artists’ museum” is, the real mourning is over whether this is just the first fatality in what might become a cultural serial murder. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Who Killed the LA MoCA?"