From Art Brut to Art without Boundaries: A Century of Fascination through the Eyes of Hans Prinzhorn, Jean Dubuffet and Harald Szeemann, by Carine Fol. Skira, Milan, 192 pages, 80 color illustrations, 2015. ISBN: 978-8-8572-2748-1. Paperback, $45 Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet, by Valérie Rousseau with a foreword by Anne-Imelda Radice and contributions from Jean Dubuffet, Sarah Lombardi, Kent Minturn and Jill Shaw. American Folk Art Museum, New York, 248 pages, 142 illustrations, 2016. ISBN: 978-0-9121-6126-6. Paperback, $45 Jean Dubuffet – inventor of art brut, important painter, master collector and connoisseur, exploiter, radical, crank. For obvious reasons
Continue readingLakeside Carvings Uncovered
Ten years of lakeshore projects in Chicago have destroyed scores of vernacular stone carvings, but the most recent project has uncovered some fantastic examples. These are installed on the stretch of new lakeshore at Fullerton Avenue. (See my collection of more than a hundred other lakeshore carvings here.) For those who follow such things, a closer look at this “Easter Island” carving revealed a signature and date: RS -05- (see the bottom of the photo). It is very cool that someone was making carvings of this complexity in 2005 — certainly the most recent I’ve seen. Where this rock originally
Continue readingSome Milwaukee Signs
A brief swing through Milwaukee is enough to turn up some fine examples of roadside art.
Continue readingFrom the corporate slogan department
“Providing solutions for your specialty needs” It’s a medical equipment rental company, by the way.
Continue readingSpam of the week
From “Linda”: Your cranium must be prtecoting some very valuable brains.
Continue readingReview: Ray Yoshida’s Museum Of Extraordinary Values
Ray Yoshida’s Museum Of Extraordinary Values by Karen Patterson My rating: 5 of 5 stars I’ve had the privilege of seeing Ray Yoshida’s art collection only twice, the first time in 1994 when I was co-curating a show of bottle-cap art for Chicago’s Intuit. Ray was gracious and loaned some pieces. His collection was spectacular, but tellingly, it did not seem out of the ordinary. If it was finer than many I had seen (my own included), it was not fundamentally different in style and approach. The mix of Maxwell Street flea-market finds with masterpieces is a hallmark of the
Continue reading
Review: The Family Circus: Daily and Sunday Comics, 1962-63
The Family Circus: Daily and Sunday Comics, 1962-63 by Bil Keane My rating: 5 of 5 stars I liked Peanuts as a kid but I loved Family Circus. Where Charles Schulz used his kids to make universal points, Bil Keane tried to be about real kids and real parents. It was a chronicle of post-war suburban life, and I could relate. It also was probably the greatest source of insight I had into the parental point of view (well, along with Dave Berg’s The Lighter Side comics in Mad Magazine, with had some similarities to Circus in style and point
Continue readingSpam {comment|message|kudos} of the {day|week|month|year}
Every once in a while I take a look in my spam folder and find something really {awesome|amazing|very good|superb|fantastic|excellent|great}. This is one of the better examples — kind of a how-to for composing a spam comment. Really, it’s a template you could apply to writing almost any kind of message. I’m sure “samanthablanchette@—.com” would be happy for {other folks|folks|other people|people} to make use of it. {I have|I’ve} been {surfing|browsing} online more than {three|3|2|4} hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. {It’s|It is} pretty worth enough for me. {In my opinion|Personally|In my view}, if all {webmasters|site owners|website
Continue reading
Roadside Indiana
A roadside art trip on the gyros trail through northwest Indiana ended in Michigan City. Not so much gyros there, but some fine paintings, including one of the best wall signs I’ve seen, at Up-In-Smoke Rib Shack. Also some lovely constructions by Tim Bruce along the way.
Continue readingReview: Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. by Viv Albertine My rating: 5 of 5 stars I came of age around the same time as Viv Albertine and I was drawn to punk, so this memoir was bound to resonate for me. Much as I appreciated punk’s exasperation with the state of both society and popular music, though, I was far too inhibited, and more to the point way too square, to be part of the scene. Albertine was very much in the thick of it, however — friend and bandmate of Sid Vicious pre-Sex Pistols, close to
Continue reading