Robert Gordon 
In one way or another, the issue of finding meaning in life lies in the innumerable choices we make everyday. Shakespeare’s existential “To be, or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet suggests that the search for a meaningful life has life and death implications. I agree, and believe the visual arts provide part of the …
Portraiture and John Singleton Copley’s Samuel Adams John Singleton Copley’s 1772 portrait of Samuel Adams in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is among the most important artworks of the American revolutionary period. John Hancock commissioned the work, which hung in his home alongside his own portrait that the artist painted seven years earlier. …
An April 2025 story in The Art Newspaper contains the headline “Miami dealer charged for hawking fake Warhols.” I must admit that the phrase “fake Warhol” forced an audible laugh; the American Pop Art icon’s work is saturated in “fake,” within the term’s connotations of “inauthentic,” “imitation,” and “unreal.” Warhol “forged” so much of his …
Artworks are powerful conveyors of ideas and values. They demonstrate that cultural artifacts are one place where the rubber hits the road, as it were, with respect to how images and ideas relate. In these protests, art’s power to propound ideas and embody values is being used as a weapon to oppose certain events and ideas some find objectionable.
As human beings we have an extraordinary ability to think scientifically, to disassemble the world mathematically, to come out of ourselves and solve problems objectively. But we also have the concomitant subjective faculties of contemplation, appreciation, and reflection.
It was Andy Warhol, who through Pop Art transformed the wedded cults of celebrity and consumerism into icons for our national and international contemplation.
Thus past, present and future converge to create an artwork whose meaning is immediately accessible but whose spatial and semantic depth successfully merge to produce one of the greatest works of art ever created.
Is it conceivable for such a deeply rooted art from an Asian culture to inform the spirituality of the American or European viewer? Quite possibly.
Five hundred years after the artist’s death, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper has continued to inspire both believers and non-believers alike. The artwork seems to have tapped into in our collective consciousness. How so?
A safe space for the beautiful.
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