Ben Larrabee is a fine art photographer who captures essence of people. His photographs are a part of numerous private collections and in museums such as the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Roger’s Hollow, a small...
In March 1994, as a result of the exhibition The New Generation: Two Decades of Contemporary Cuban Photography from the Island, held at the Richmond Hall in Houston, the critic Susan Kalil published a suggestive review entitled Socialist Surrealism, in which she warned of a...
The first leg of this three-part article explores the question of how artists can contest a received cultural narrative or artistic convention by using fragmentary, or vestigial components as visual proxies for disruption, fracture and protest. I have chosen to present this argument by looking...
In early 1976 a rather mysterious-looking three-tiered leather coffre from France arrived at the Soviet Ministry of Culture. The case contained 37 exceptionally rare pieces of avant-garde jewelry made from gold and platinum, and encrusted with diamonds – brooches, rings and watches. This was the...
There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last. (Robert Louis Stevenson) Tokyo is quite blessed with over fifty museums scattered all over the metropolitan area, but there is, perhaps, only one that is...
In 1979, when a Chicago disc jockey blew up numerous disco records at Comiskey Park in Chicago, it was America’s underbelly of white trash declaring that they demanded their culture back from the folks who had inadvertently overshadowed it. These folks were everything the trash...
Starting with a rant really: I have to confess to the dual sentiments of deep frustration and bleak resignation at finding myself writing about NFTs, no not London’s National Film and Television School (NFTS), but what I would describe as the topical, pernicious fantasy of...
The Covid-19 pandemic has badly shaken the art industry: with sales going down by almost 40%, many galleries and art businesses are downsizing or closing down altogether, the mid-range galleries being hit the worst. According to the recent Art Basel/UBS report, the art market has...
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like...
If music be the food of love, play on Give me excess of it. (William Shakespeare) It is generally accepted that music is, indeed, the food of love, and possibly the food of art, too. It is also largely agreed that music and visual arts are strongly...