Category

Art

What does a good artist do?

Good artists are people who can stick things together so that they stay stuck. They know how to gather things into formal arrangements that are intelligible, memorable, and lasting. Good forms confer health upon the things that they gather together. Farms, families, and communities are forms of art just as are poems, paintings, and symphonies….

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Lester Beall’s Graphic Design is Modern and Free!

Lester Beall was the first US designer to create images that were truly free of European influences. His poster series for the Rural Electrification Administration, made up of simple ideograms stripped of all geometric superfluities, and with unashamedly plain typography, may be considered the earliest example of true American graphic design, modern and free. –From…

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This Is Not A Pipe: Rene Magritte & Michel Foucault Tag Team

The mystical, Platonic identification of words with the essence of things is what many of Magritte’s canvases vigorously assault. Just as in Saussurean linguistics words do not “refer” to things, in Magritte’s Surrealism the painter’s images do not really “resemble” anything whose sovereign presence would lend it the aspect of a model or origin. When…

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