Monthly Archive for July, 2011

From Morgan Meis at The Smart Set…

“Ostalgia” is a dangerous art show. The name alone tells you that. It is troubling that a term such as “ostalgia” exists at all. The term first gained popularity in Berlin after the Wall came down in 1989. By the mid-1990s, some people were feeling nostalgic for the divided Berlin that had so suddenly passed away. The term östalgie was born. Öst is the German word for East, so Östalgie was a coinage referring to that feeling of having lost a part of the city, the East part.

That specific form of nostalgia made some sense in Berlin. Whatever the horrors and heartbreak of the Berlin Wall, it was a modern icon. The divided city of Berlin was the unofficial headquarters of the Cold War. When the Wall came down, there was general euphoria. The divisions of the past were being overcome. East Berlin was quickly pulled into the Western orbit. Berlin became whole again, but the price of wholeness was the loss of its importance as a Cold War capital. As the entire city was Westernized, it simultaneously became less unique. More…

From Lucian Freud at The New York Times…

Lucian Freud, whose stark and revealing paintings of friends and intimates, splayed nude in his studio, recast the art of portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art, died on Wednesday night at his home in London. He was 88.

He died following a brief illness, said William Acquavella of Acquavella Galleries, Mr. Freud’s dealer.

Mr. Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud and a brother of the British television personality Clement Freud, was already an important figure in the small London art world when, in the immediate postwar years, he embarked on a series of portraits that established him as a potent new voice in figurative art.

In paintings like “Girl With Roses” (1947-48) and “Girl With a White Dog” (1951-52), he put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter’s social facade. Ordinary people — many of them his friends — stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist’s ruthless inspection. More…

From Laura Gonzalez, Artlog

The Venice Biennale is a lot like the FIFA World Cup, but for art. It features multifaceted displays of national talent in an ambiance of courteous yet zealous competition for the ultimate prize – in Venice it’s the Gold Lion, in the World Cup it’s, well, the cup. For both cases, the participants have been carefully selected through a series of preliminary rounds and eliminations. Making it to the final competition is a reward in itself. It’s no coincidence that the Venice Biennale has also been termed “the Olympics of Art.”

The World Cup and the Olympics are known for their unabashed displays of raucous nationalism. Flags, patriotic chants, and cross-national rivalries are the order of the day. In Venice, however, we find a completely different atmosphere, one that furtively tries to ignore the fact that it is, at base level, a competition between countries. Recently, many have been trying to downplay the fact that the Biennale has historically relied on the age-old concept of nationality and national identity.

The format of the Venice Biennale, which consists of participating countries exhibiting one or several of their compatriot artists within their own pavilion, has come under fire over the last few years. Nationalism, some say, is no longer a relevant frame for an artists’ oeuvre. We live in a transnational, globalized world, where boundaries between countries have largely ceased to determine one’s identity or creative output.

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