Earlier this month, I was invited to be a guest on William Shatner’s new talk show I Don’t Understand. I am honored to join the ranks of his distinguished guests, including astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Our topic was: “What is Art, Really?”
Click on the image below to watch the full episode.
Or, here is the audio:
On August 25th the Netflix premiered a new documentary about Bob Ross directed by Joshua Rofé. I was interviewed for it in January of 2020.
My participation in the feature came out of a 2018 The New Criterion article I wrote about America’s greatest “television artist.” To read full article click on the image below.
Here is a sampling of the film’s reviews published in the New Republic, the ArtNews, the Hollywood Reporter, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
This article is a response to a Hyperallergic editorial which argued that curation by “frontline museum workers” is preferable to that of trained curators.
Click on the image below to read the full text.
Quillette just published my article on the relationship between art history and pornography. Click on the image below to read the full text.
Another co-authored article on NFTs—“The Afterlife of the Aura” out on the Atheneum Review website.
The “aura” is what makes the experience of viewing Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre, or his drawings at the Met, different from looking at their images in a book. It is inseparable from the viewer’s visceral reaction to the physical traits of the work: variable pressure of the crayon on paper, the thickness of impasto brushstrokes or their glossy translucency, the weave of the canvas showing through the loosely applied imprimatura, the mutable effects of light playing on the surface at different times of day. An artwork’s aura is also the source of its financial value, the reason the original Mona Lisa is worth more than a reproduction. But if the original is destroyed, there is nowhere physical for the aura to reside. The aura’s abstract, symbolic nature is then revealed, and it becomes possible to package, market and sell the aura in the absence of the original. The destruction of the original allows the NFT to monetize the aura, imposing on it the form of financial value. As Daystrom explain:
Value has become increasingly fungible, diluted and unstable in our evolving metaverse and there’s a tremendous spike in user demand for exclusivity. NFT assets provide this exclusivity and create an entirely new online value system that was previously unimaginable.
But an “aura” is not a material thing. Does it necessarily perish along with its physical incarnation? Perhaps it was not destroyed so much as transubstantiated, reborn into a financialized afterlife where it is no longer subject to mortal decay. Like BurntBanksy, Daystrom make a plea for authenticity, not a protest against it. But authenticity is no longer a quality of the original artwork, contingent on the artist’s touch or painterly gesture. Authenticity is now a quality of the NFT that represents the original, and the only authenticity available today is statistical uniqueness. Yet people remain sentimentally attached to the old distinctions between authenticity and image, original and reproduction, reality and representation. The cries of fear and loathing at the prospect of destroying a Basquiat drawing (albeit not a great one) or a Banksy print (albeit one of an edition of 500) are not naïve defenses of the artwork’s lost integrity. They are inarticulate but nonetheless passionate protests against the postmodern condition. No wonder the word “deconstruction” where simple “destruction” would have sufficed was so triggering.
Read the entire article HERE
Athenaeum Review just published a co-authored article “The Marriage of Art & Money” on the ubiquitous topic of digital art NFTs.
The relationship between art and money has always been symbiotic. It has been equally true with papal patronage in sixteenth century, and with the interwar European avant-garde whose fortunes, according to Greenberg, were inexorably linked to the market ‘by an umbilical cord of gold.’ After all, art and money are basically similar phenomena: both are valuable and significant systems of symbols. The twentieth century was replete with artists questioning the relationship between art and money. Their difference from Beeple was that they were looking for ways to uncouple the pair, rather than fuse them. As early as 1914, Duchamp’s revolutionary concept of the ‘readymade’ had undermined the process of commodification that had engulfed the artworld. Along with his Dadaist allies, Duchamp succeeded in redefining the fine arts, moving away from the given of physical painting and sculpture and towards serialized, de-commodified, temporary or even traceless performances and manifestos.
By insisting that a fictitious ‘R. Mutt’ had the right to anoint a urinal as art because ‘whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it,’ Duchamp initiated what the late David Graeber called the ‘aesthetic validation of managerialism.’ A lowly plumbing fixture can be art, as long as someone (who did not even create it) calls it art. The task of validation, and the creation of value, later devolved from artists to curators, who could throw ordinary objects into the mix along with bona fideartworks, confident that no one could legitimately object. Today this function falls to auction houses which, in Graeber’s words, use ‘money as a sacral grace that baptizes ordinary objects magically, turning them into a higher value.’ That is exactly what happened to Beeple’s opus on March 11, 2021 when the sale closed at $69,346,250.
Read the entire article HERE
In early March, The New Criterion published “A Cleaner Slate”—my review of four exhibitions of abstract painting: “Paul Mogensen” at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, “Gerhard Richter: Cage Paintings” at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, “Stanley Whitney: How Black is That Blue” at Matthew Marks, Los Angeles and “Jim Isermann: Hypercube” at Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles.
The great modernist eccentric Alexei Remizov was a “writers’ writer” whose innovative poetic prose has long since entered the Russian literary canon. Gradually expanding his working methods to make drawing an integral part of the writing process, during the 1930s and 1940s, Remizov created hundreds of albums that combined texts with collages and india ink and watercolor illustrations. (more) Northwestern University Press 7 x 10, 300 pgs, Trade Cloth ISBN 0-8101-2617-6 / $69.95
Between June 2014 and April 2015, Dave Hickey posted almost 3,000 digital comments on social media, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes, and skeptics. Wasted Words is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. This polyphonic digital discourse reveals the range of Hickey’s strong opinions, as he embarks on a crypto-enlightenment project for the benefit of "dunces" and "pricks." Paperback, 586 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 1517287103
Dustbunnies is an assemblage of “swept up” fragments that came from a vast digital discourse that took place in Dave Hickey’s social media space between June 2014 and March 2015. During that time Hickey posted almost 3,000 comments, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes and skeptics. Wasted Words, the resulting volume, is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. Its pendant publication, Dustbunnies, distills Hickey’s richly aphoristic comments, extracted from various discussion threads. Paperback, 124 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 152327266X
Over the past seven years Wayne Thiebaud has made dozens of paintings, drawings, and etchings of clowns. Like much of his work, this latest series is in a sense autobiographical. During his boyhood in Long Beach he looked forward to the visits of a traveling Ringling Brothers circus and sometimes helped out behind the scenes in exchange for tickets. The costumes, faces, and antics of the clowns were the beginning of a lifelong fascination for him. The clown series is its culmination, in which the now 100-year-old artist revisits those early memories. In December 2019 Wayne Thiebaud unveiled a selection from his clown series at the San Francisco gallery founded by his son, Paul Thiebaud. The Laguna Art Museum exhibition will be a version of the Paul Thiebaud Gallery exhibition, featuring more than forty works. Fully illustrated with 56 artwork reproductions. Essay by Dr. Julia Friedman. Interview with the artist by Janet Bishop, the Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Hardcover: 100 pages; ISBN-10: 0578798573ISBN-13: 978-0578798578
Celebrating the 100th birthday of one of America's most respected and beloved artists, Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings honors a lifetime of extraordinary achievements across many genres. Best known for his tantalizing paintings of desserts, Thiebaud has long been affiliated with Pop Art, though his body of work is far more expansive, continuing to grow as the artist approaches his milestone birthday. Across the decades, Thiebaud has explored various details of American life through his art from urban views and rural landscapes to clowns and household items all the time continuing to explore the food subjects that made him famous. Wayne Thiebaud 100 accompanies an exhibition of the same name, organized by the Crocker Art Museum. In addition to the 100 paintings, prints, and drawings featured in the exhibition, this publication includes numerous other contextual paintings by Thiebaud, art by the masters who inspired him, and photographs of the artist with family and friends, taken over the course of his extraordinary career. Hardcover : 212 pages ISBN-10 : 1087501172 Dimensions : 9.8 x 0.9 x 11.3 inches ISBN-13 : 978-1087501178
Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev Adele Marie Barker (Editor), Eliot Borenstein (Contributor), Julia Friedman (Contributor), Adam Weiner (Contributor), Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky (Contributor), Robert Edelman (Contributor) With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors... (more) Paperback: 488 pages Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 10, 1999) Language: English ISBN-10: 0822323133 ISBN-13: 978-0822323136
“A Powerless Seeker: Merezhkovsky’s Romance as Life-Writing” by Julia Friedman In Symbolism, its Origins and Consequences. Edited by Rosina Neginsky. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2010 Hardcover: 665 pages Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing New edition edition (October 1, 2010) Language: English ISBN-10: 1443823929 ISBN-13: 978-1443823920
“The Writing-Drawing Continuum of Alexei Remizov,” by Julia Friedman "Elective affinities" - a notion originally borrowed by Goethe for his 1809 novel of the same title from eighteenth-century chemistry - here refers to the active role of the two partners in the relationship of the pictorial and the verbal... In In Elective Affinities: Word & Image Interactions 6, 2008 Edited by Catriona McLeod, Véronique Plesch and Charlotte Schoell-Glass. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Paperback: 422 pages Publisher: Rodopi (June 20, 2009) Language: English ISBN-10: 9042026189 ISBN-13: 978-9042026186
“Alexei Remizov’s Creative Act,” by Julia Friedman. Edited by Maurice Geracht and Frédéric Ogée. In Interfaces: Image Text Language, vol. 29, 2010
Julia Friedman
