News Art Blog

We all dream of mastering a skill like a pro—to skate like an Olympian, sing like an Idol, or go to the hoop “like Mike.” What if we could learn to see how an artist sees? “It’s so important to move through the world with this kind of wonder,” artist Bo Bartlett says of putting on an artist’s eyes in SEE: An Art Road Trip. “It all passes so fast.” Directed by Bartlett with his wife and fellow artist Betsy Eby and filmmaker Glenn Holsten, SEE challenges and inspires us to see the world through an artist’s eyes not necessarily in hopes of making art but, more importantly, in hopes of our appreciating the beauty that rushes past us and our high-speed everyday lives. Part road trip, part art history lesson, and part existential drama, SEE at all times conveys a vision of a more aware, more visually activated life that most of us only dream of but can finally experience, if only fleetingly, through these pros’ eyes. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Can We Learn to See How Artists See?"

In the wake of the Dr. King Memorial kerfuffle, I’ve been thinking more and more of how public art is a state of mind as much as a physical thing in a physical place. In an article in the inaugural issue of Public Art Dialogue, Joshua Fisher argues that Gutzon Borglum’s Mount Rushmore National Memorial and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty exemplify this dual nature of public art, specifically in their relationship to the idea of American “Manifest Destiny.” By examining what Borglum said in his sculpture versus what his “antithesis” Smithson said in his earth art, Fisher sheds new light on each work and provides a template for analyzing the MLK monument and those that will follow. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Public Art Exists More in Our Minds than in Some Place."