Tag: art
Toad Christ -- Art Or Sacrilege?
MayorBob.
Posted to Etcetera on Tue Sep 02, 2008 at 06:50:18 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.
Is it art or not? That's the eternal question which has greeted such efforts as Fountain by Marcel DuChamp, Piss Christ by Andres Serrano, and so on. Just as it always is, so it goes with a piece hung in a museum in Bolzano, Italy. The art critic assailing the piece does have a certain air of authority about him. But, nevermind, the museum says "meh" to the critic's concerns and that they're going to continue to display the crucified toad.
(9 comments, 394 words in story) Full Story
Abraham Obama - One Man's Art Becomes Another's Act Of Vandalism
MayorBob.
Posted to Etcetera on Sun Jul 13, 2008 at 07:57:40 PM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.
Smallish art gallery in major city wants to promote an exhibition. They get the brilliant idea to commission one of the artists to draw a very large mural on the side of a downtown building. The openly political mural is considered by many to be a thought-provoking and intriguing piece of art.
(6 comments, 582 words in story) Full Story
Animal Cruelty Or Art?
MayorBob.
Posted to Etcetera on Thu Apr 17, 2008 at 02:48:03 PM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.
Artists like to press the artistic envelope to see if they can emerge with a new definition of art. In doing so, artists will provoke and occasionally outrage us. But, if they're doing their job right, they are always asking us to question our preconceived notions of what art is. A pitfall for artists out on the envelope's edge is that they will emerge into areas which shock and outrage a public which believes isn't art. Such is the case of artist Guillermo Vargas and what he calls art and what others call animal cruelty.
(39 comments, 481 words in story) Full Story
Blue-Nose Bureaucrats Ban Butt Beer
MayorBob.
Posted to Legal on Tue Dec 05, 2006 at 01:46:05 AM EST (promoted by 1fastdog). RSS.
Ben Franklin once said "beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Other than that brief 20th century fling with Prohibition, Americans have embraced Franklin's wisdom and have pronounced their partiality to one brand or another of beer. Bottom line, the acid test for most beer drinkers is how good tasting the beer is. Then there are the government bureaucrats whose idea of good taste is something totally different than beer drinkers. Because a particular brand of British beer fails their bottom line good taste test, the liquor control folks in Maine are banning the sales of said beer. But, it's not the taste of the beer that has the bureaucrats in Maine steamed; it's the good taste of the label on the bottle.
(17 comments, 595 words in story) Full Story
Yo, That's No Painting -- That's An Historic Object
MayorBob.
Posted to Legal on Sun Dec 03, 2006 at 07:03:44 PM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.
When is a piece of art more than a piece of art? When does your property become something you can't sell? These questions are playing themselves out right now in Philadelphia where one Philadelphia institution is fighting another Philadelphia institution over the right to sell a painting.
(2 comments, 612 words in story) Full Story
The Art Of War -- Iraqi Style
MayorBob.
Posted to Politics on Sun Nov 12, 2006 at 09:11:58 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.
"War is hell" is the line attributed to General William T. Sherman, uttered as his Union forces advanced on the sea to explain the devastation wrought to the Georgia countryside along the way. Had anyone asked Robert E. Lee, leading the Confederate forces, if he agreed with Sherman, they might have gotten an answer in the affirmative -- "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it." More recently, the president's mom Barbara Bush described war as "not nice." Most of us, living in states believing in civilian control of the military would endorse former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau's observation that "war is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military." Following the latest explanation of the state of things in Iraq by a general in Iraq, we might want to amend Clemenceau's statement to add: "war is too serious a matter to be explained by the military."
(18 comments, 535 words in story) Full Story
