Painting is Dead, Long Live the King!

By: Peggy Nelson

The problem is art is BORING. It just sits there. What’s wrong with a little entertainment? It needs some livening up, some relevance, some – animation? Right, let’s digitize some of this old stuff and […]

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She Blinded Me With Science

By: Peggy Nelson

I’m making a dress out of film. Very slippery and annoying, film. But it is possible, just; you can sew through the little holes and then anchor it to itself with splicing tape. It’s perfect […]

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Andy did you hear about this one?

By: Peggy Nelson

[still from Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902, by Georges Méliès] We believe that it was a largely ceremonial site, as we have found no evidence of agriculture or permanent habitation. And in addition to […]

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Cocktail Recipe: The Buzz

By: Peggy Nelson

Ingredients: 1 1/2 ounces vodka 1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice 1/4 ounce honey lysozyme, beaten (substitution: one egg white) pinch cayenne Instructions: Shake all ingredients except cayenne with ice long and hard to completely emulsify […]

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Let’s Talk About Sex

By: Peggy Nelson

I know we only just met, but don’t worry, it’s science. [I Rub My Duckie vibrator image courtesy sfgate.com] I mean vibrators, of course. It’s great how flexible our metaphors are, how they vibrate with […]

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Backwards and in High Heels

By: Peggy Nelson

Attention gets a lot of attention these days. Mostly as currency, as in, how to make paying attention pay off. Switch one value proposition for another, dissolve everything in the universal $olvent. I’m going to […]

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Artist in Residence: Peggy Nelson

By: HILOBROW

HiLobrow.com is not opposed to the “guest blogger.” But it’s a waxy concept, sticky and vexing, isn’t it? Guests have been deployed by too many blogs for everything from vacation coverage to boredom-bandaging. Uncanny guests […]

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Peggy Guggenheim

By: Lynn Peril

She had oodles of cash, acres of style, and eventually her very own 18th-century palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal, where she slept in a sterling silver bed designed by Alexander Calder. There was heartache — […]

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Marcel Duchamp

By: Douglas Wolk

The one piece of fine-art-inspired kitsch I’ve been craving ever since I first heard of it is a long-unavailable shower curtain reproducing “The Large Glass” (“The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even”) by MARCEL […]

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Nam Jun Paik

By: Patrick Cates

In the Orwellian year of 1984, my father took me to the Centre Pompidou and exposed my 10-year-old sponge of a brain to its first contemporary art collection and, therein, to a towering agglomeration of […]

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Rube Goldberg

By: Joe Alterio

Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist RUBE GOLDBERG (1883-1970) pulls string (A) which activates bellows. Bellows (B) compresses, inflating balloon (C). Expanding balloon causes glass of water (D) to tip, soaking sponge (E). Sponge, due to increased weight […]

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Margaret Bourke-White

By: Lynn Peril

The name MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE (1904-71) conjures up an image: a woman with a camera balanced atop one of the chromed, art-deco eagles that guard the upper reaches of New York’s Chrysler Building. Though she didn’t […]

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Egon Schiele

By: Peggy Nelson

EGON SCHIELE (1890-1918) was the best thing about the blizzard I spent in Vienna. I had gone to see the remnants of a nervous splendor, expecting well-behaved aesthetic souvenirs from a once-hypermodern past. But when […]

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Jasper Johns

By: Peggy Nelson

Known best for his Flag (1954-5) and Map (1961), JASPER JOHNS (born 1930) along with his friend and one-time lover Robert Rauschenberg, applied gestural painting and bold, unblended color to everyday images and objects. Focusing […]

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Joseph Beuys

By: Peggy Nelson

A conceptual artist, self-inventor, and master of materials who constructed his strongest work out of intangibles, JOSEPH BEUYS (1921-1986) was our postcard deity in art school. His sense of the absurd combined with his high […]

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