Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2021 annual California Cool Auction at the Laguna Art Museum is entirely online. Here is my virtual tour of the auction where I highlight some of this year’s hidden gems.
Athenaeum Review, Issue 5, Winter 2021 The Winter 2021 issue of arts and humanities quarterly Athenaeum Review is out on newsstands. Its Current Affairs section contains my essay “Classicism by Decree” (pp. 148–155) about an attempted change in the aesthetic direction of federal architecture in the US. Since 1962, the General Services Administration (the same […]
Moderated by Crocker Art Museum Associate Director & Chief Curator Scott A. Shields, Ph.D., this informative discussion between three people connected to Wayne Thiebaud will center around insights and unique experiences. Join the artist’s daughter, model, and writer Twinka Thiebaud; painter and professor Hearne Pardee; and critic and art historian Julia Friedman, Ph.D., for a singular program on Thiebaud and his […]
Camille Paglia’s latest book is the very definition of protean. The eight sections of this seven-hundred-page volume, fittingly titled Provocations, cover popular culture, film, sex/gender/women, literature, art, education, politics and religion. Paglia, who calls herself “pro-pop and pro-sex,” has also proven a fierce advocate of the canon, which for her encompasses the best of civilization. Those familiar with her writings will know that this breadth is not an indication of some egomaniacal attempt at a “theory of everything,” but a sensible shortcut to sorting out decades of writing on an expansive range of subjects. After all, the author’s scholarly maiden voyage—Sexual Personae (1990)—was another seven-hundred-page tome that addressed the continuity of Western culture through an analysis of sexuality and eroticism in art. Intellectual ambition is still Camille Paglia’s middle name.
[portfolio_slideshow slideheight=400] These photos are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Photos by Neil A. Miller, Rafael Navarro, and Ellee Bokharachi .
With four more weeks of the course still ahead of us, the Writing Art & Design Criticism seminar students have already had a chance to welcome several well-regarded art critics and art writers, including Lee Ambrozy, the editor-at-large for Artforum.com.cn and the editor and translator of Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews and Digital Rants 2006–2009 (MIT Press, 2011 http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ai-weiweis-blog). She is also one of […]
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
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
