Category: Art

Groundwaters book cover

Book Review: Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught And Outsider Artists

Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught And Outsider Artists, Charles Russell, Prestel, 256 pages, 180 color illustrations, 2011. ISBN: 978-3-7913-4490-4. Hardcover $65.00 Charles Russell’s Groundwaters has the look and feel of a conventional coffee table book, and it can indeed be appreciated simply for its many beautiful plates representing the work of important self-taught artists of the 20th Century. Start reading the text, however, and another kind of book emerges. Those pictures aren’t there just because they’re striking. Each one is referenced in the text to make or elucidate a point, and Russell has many to make. Their density

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Go cat go

Really obscure epiphany time: Listening to some early Carl Perkins tunes (best rockabilly ever), I realized that when he refers to “cats” he doesn’t mean guys, which is what I always assumed based on more recent usage, but to girls. That would include the famous “go cat go” line in Blue Suede Shoes.” Makes more sense.

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Review: public phenomena

public phenomena by Temporary Services My rating: 5 of 5 stars A cool little art book about the everyday, and mostly inadvertent, aesthetic experiences that turn up as people attempt to the adapt the urban environment to their needs (and occasionally as the urban environment adapts to people). Photos range around the world showing everything from post-snowstorm parking blockades in Chicago to makeshift barriers in Ljubjana to ghost houses all over. The book itself is a form of the adaptation it celebrates. Taking note of the aesthetic content hidden in plain view by the side of the road is a

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Book Review: South African Township Barbershops and Salons

South African Township Barbershops and Salons, Simon Weller, Mark Batty Publisher, 128 pages, 2011. ISBN 978-1-935613-04-6. Hard cover $27.95 If African Signs, with its minimal text but rich collection of photographs, provides a window to African vernacular culture, South African Township Barbershops & Salons passes through that window to provide something of an inside tour. Simon Weller, a professional photographer, not only document numerous advertising signs but also spent time with the hair cutters and their customers as well as several sign painters. He aims not just to show the art but also the culture in which the art is

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The Beauty of Silence

Just saw The Artist. It reminds me of what was lost when sound came into the movies. Filmmakers achieved an amazing level of visual sophistication and power before sound, and it took years — some would say decades — to regain the artistic momentum stopped dead by sounds’ enormous technical overhead. Indeed, there is an argument that the artistic requirements of building movies around dialogue are inherently at odds with realizing their full visual potential. That’s a bit overstated, but there’s a point to it. If The Artist, produced when filmmakers are basically amateurs in the art of silent movies,

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