Dr Great Art! Short, Fun Art History Artecdotes!

Immaturity, maturity, and the desire for the latter in art and the repression of that desire in culture at large.

An 'academicist' in the arts is someone who over-idealizes the art academy; one who follows the precepts taught there and insists others do so as well. Here is a short history of academicism and thoughts about the problem now.

Epistemology: the philosophical analysis of the search for knowledge. Does it exist in art? How and what can we know? Will it replace the ubiquitous ontological expressions in Postmodernism?

A short, yet gloomy, podcast for summer. My mother Ruth Staff Brandl passed away very recently at the age of 87. In this tough, sad time, my mind still approaches the world through art, yet I find it hard to find any comfort therein. In our artworld nowadays, it seems almost ridiculous. Grief, though, like most important and complex human emotions, has been the subject or inspiration for many great works of art

Her obituary is at: http://brandl-art-articles.blogspot.com/2019/07/ruth-staff-brandl-obituary.html

The creation of a term for one of the problems in the artworld, one very obvious around June each year when we all go to the Basel Art Fair, often the Venice Biennale, documenta etc.  A phrase for the convenient conformity of (small) minds to have identical tastes in order to achieve hegemony.

Julia Kristeva, the Bulgarian-French philosopher, offers in her theorization hope for resistance against ruling ideologies within artworks themselves. Artists can produce "openings" by creating metaphors through serious play, turning rules upside down, displaying pleasure, laughter and poetry which include thoughtful critique --- delightful, anarchistic, alternative visions that are embodiments of and empower other forms of resistance.

Dr Cornel West has described himself as a "Bluesman in the life of the mind, and a Jazzman in the world of ideas." I feel similarly, I am a Bluesman of the mind, a Rock n Roller of painting and installations, a sequential-artist/comic-book penciler of art history.

FIFTY! Petr Brandl, the once very famous Baroque painter from Bohemia/Czech Republic and my distant ancestor. And a Festival Brandl with Geisslers Hofcomoedianten in Prague!

Peaceable Kingdom, Georama, Kamishibai. Edward Hicks, John Banvard, Toba Sojo. Inspirations and antecedants for my Dr Great Art performance-lecture paintings.

This podcast episode concerns something important to many artists, yet seldom openly discussed. That is, what "side jobs" artists have to do to stay alive. Many do not want to admit to this AT ALL.

The future art is not posthistorical, but rather polyhistorical, plurogenic (multistrand), not monogenic (single strand). There are various models and/or master narratives of art history, from the immensely limited discussion of the traditional narrow canon to timorous avoidance of any timeline due to postmodern guilt, treating artworks as mere stand-ins for particular ideologies. The late art critic John Perreault and I have created a new, more transparent model: the Braid, or Braided Rope. See additional content for an image of the Braid Model.

Some scattered reflections on the complex role of color in art including several things that bother me regularly in purportedly theoretical discussions of it. Color is wonderful, and necessary, but it is a happily difficult entity for theory.

It’s difficult to look into the future with any hope. What IS the role of hope in art? To me, it is all important.

Bakhtinian notions which could serve as great inspiration for visual art include his sense of the living fluidity of expression; his concepts of heteroglossia, polyphonic form, and dialogic form; his insight that these may engender the liberation of alternative voices; and his presentation of the carnival as a suggestive metaphor.

This episode's artecdote clarifies the historical terminology for the dominant Postmodernist art movement since circa 1985: 'Neo-Conceptualism.' Neo-Conceptualists themselves generally try to refer to themselves with the earlier term as 'Conceptualists,' but this is a political ploy, an ahistorical part of a powerplay, pretending that they are a part of the movement form which they derive.

This episode, I give my definition of visual metaphor. This is a new area of scholarly interest, and there have been few attempts to clearly describe visual metaphor or trope. This is an important foundational action and idea for the book on visual metaphor and contemporary art I am in the process of writing.

Conceptual Artist Lawrence Weiner is quite fond of formulating statements in which he claims to have dismissed metaphor from his artwork. He is completely wrong. No matter what is claimed, Lawrence Weiner's art, and most Conceptual Art and Neo-Conceptual Art, whether good or bad, is deeply grounded in interlocking base metaphors; metaphors commonly ignored because they are so transparent.

Goya's amazing speech to the newly founded Spanish Art Academy School. He was invited to speak to them as he was well-respected and was interested in helping other artists learn. Yet he had a profound dislike and fear of Academicism. Not only one of the best artists of all history, but was an independent and socially critical thinker, although he was court painter. Academics are scholars, and he and I are not criticizing them or their practice, rather AcademICISM, which is the worship of the Academy, the belief in Rules for Art and Creativity. And that these can be memorized.

The phenomenon of artists copying each other and themselves (not forgeries, copies). Something thoroughly disdained since Modernism, yet an activity that was important before that, for learning, out of admiration, for expanding an audience, for additional income. And some thoughts about the situation now.

New Historicism or alternately Cultural Materialism, and how its ideas are auspicious for visual metaphor, art history and conceptions of context in visual art. Art History consists of multiple histories, discontinuous and contradictory ones. The heretical response to authoritarian demand is important. Works of art express the problems and alienation of our or any time and place, but also frequently offer expressions of fullness that attack that alienation and help shatter the incrustations of belief forced upon us. Art History should discuss both.

Does originality in art even exist? A Matt Ballou listener request. "Make it new!" has certainly become old. Yet, the Postmodernist demand that a lack of originality be heralded as something new is duplicitous. A discussion of originality in art.

Paintings and novels, far from being hidebound, as is often squawked, are quintessentially antithetical: excellent disciplines for new metaphoric thought. They are ideally adversarial. They incorporate, use and criticize. They have achieved a condition of being perpetually "genres undermined." They have been in a permanent state of crisis for a minimum of several hundred years. What more could one ask for as a difficult, challenging and rewarding fray?

Metaphor is the basis of thought, which importantly arises from bodily, cultural and environmental experience. It is embodied in the body, in the world and in the expressions of it, such as visual art. Metaphors we live and create by.

Artists are directly responsible for fashioning their own tropes through the processes of extension, elaboration, composition and/or questioning. They must wrestle with their precursors, who inspired them to be creators in the first place, to do this. Such dialectical struggle, called an 'agon,' is more than simply oedipal. The African spirit Eshu, the trickster patron saint of crossroads, and Jacob, who struggled with God in the Bible, make better metaphoric models than Oedipus.

There is a somewhat frequently-heard accusation that Michelangelo forged ancient Roman sculpture at the start of his career. Here is the truth.

How is history constructed? Who makes history? And what will remain in the future from us and our culture? What is the truth? What is fabrication? Isn’t a well-told tale more exciting than simple data and facts? Facts are extremely important. Not everything goes --- yet all facts and sources of facts must be closely examined and often criticized. (Art) HistorIES.

A short podcast presenting three ideas from Feminist philosophy useful for art and metaphor: pragmatic action over absolutism, the located self, and finding loopholes in hegemonies to allow creative resistance.

A podcast in preparation for discussions of visual metaphor: one aspect of terminology, trope and metaphor.

A lighter episode relating seven stimulating facts about Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Georgia O'Keeffe.

This episode concerns a troublesome yet seldom acknowledged tendency in the artworld: Sophistry. Why are you in this struggle? Are you an artist or critic or curator simply for careerist "success"? Weren't you actually CALLED to art?

This episode's Artecdote is an explanation of my assertion that art history models are not necessarily master narratives. Art History is often told in versions of one linear story, thus a master narrative. This often delimits thought, sustains oppressive systems and purports to be the truth, allowing no exceptions. On the other hand, the stringent fear of modeling has sometimes lead the less inventive to fall into the simple nihilism of "I give up." In fact, models are important dialogical tools of and for thought.

My Artecdote this episode is the an explanation of my assertion that "Artists Create New Metaphors to Live By." Under the inspiration of Lakoff, Johnson and Turner's Cognitive Metaphor Theory, I describe my assertion that artists create for themselves new metaphors to live by, by creating new metaphors to create with, which viewers can then also use to think with and live by. This I refer to as artists’ metaphor(m)s or central tropes.

A new artistic development: Exhibition Comics and a new compositional form: Iconosequentiality.

An artist who greatly needs to be rediscovered. Not only her name, but her works! Marietta Tintoretta. The daughter of Jacopo Rubusti, aka Tintoretto. Renowned as a great artist in her time, the Late Renaissance, now disappeared.

The concept of "genius" in art has rightly been criticized for its sexism, exaggeration and more. However, it is possible to retain its useful aspects by redefining it as the level of achieved pervasiveness of an artist's metaphor(m).

What constitutes representation in a work of art? The representational nature of visual art is one of its most important, fruitful, and intriguing elements --- yet for very particular reasons.

Giotto, the painter who made the crucial change from the Medieval style thus beginning the Renaissance in art, painted a picture of the Star of Bethlehem which is an image of Halley's comet!

Mongrel Art! Democratic Art! This Dr great Art Artecdote is a description of and plaidoyer for a (Post-Postmodernist) art that is anti-purist, syncretistic, and creolized, unifying a variety of artforms, disciplines, tendencies and philosophies. Artworks involving popular or democratic and street artforms outside the "standard" fine art ones, yet also not eschewing either so-called time-honored, nor technologically "new" disciplines, as it seeks to revitalize and transform them all, while opening the art system and deliberately involving people outside the field of art in artistic processes.

This Dr Great Art Artecdote concerns supposed rules in art, especially painting. It describes how there are really no rules in art, and it decries the obsequiousness of those who believe there are rules and who seek to follow them.

The meaning of every artwork lies in the object itself, not in any commentary concerning it.

Times have changed drastically. Now, what provinciality is has been turned completely around. It is a state of mind, not geography.

This Dr Great Art artecdote concerns the beginning of the period, or transitional subperiod, of art in which we now exist: Postmodernism. It cannot be talked away or ignored, nor should it be worshipped. But we are in it since 1979.

This Dr Great Art artecdote is about a form of definitional conceptualization, paradigms and fuzzy categories, and how that is important to understanding art.

An artecdote about a person: Dr Professor Th. Emil Homerin, an important, inspiring scholar of religion, especially mysticism, especially the Sufis, with significant thoughts concerning art.

There are traditionally Nine Muses and Nine Arts, frequently linked to one another. This is my attempt to concoct a fresh, contemporary version of this system for no darn reason other than pure, cultural fun.

A very short 4 minute episode concerning how this podcast, the accompanying performance-lectures in painting-installations, and indeed the art historian and artist Mark Staff Brandl himself came to be called 'Dr Great Art.'

Syncretism is the blending, layering and uniting of different beliefs of various schools of thought. Easter is the holiday most evidencing syncretistic thought. Mongrel Art is a syncretistic form or art. Democratic Art syncretistically involves people outside the field of art in artistic processes.

The lessons of art history are that they are lessons. That is a tautology, but an illuminating one worth elaborating upon. It is necessary to know history as personal empowerment for artists: to test the present with the often surprising facts of the past, to note how and why "official" history has often changed; second, to discover one's own personal, vital ancestry; and finally, in order to criticize and change art history.

A short Artecdote about how our time, Postmodernism, resembles and indeed IS a form of Mannerism.

A short Artecdote concerning the difficulty in teaching an overview, or intro survey to Sub-Saharan African art, plus a free art image bank to download. Image bank link: http://brandl-art-articles.blogspot.ch/2016/10/african-art-course.html

A short artecdote discussing how criticism and complaint about the moribund artworld is important, but what positive things we can do to improve the situation.

A short Artecdote illustrating how important innovation often arises in apparently unpretentious discoveries. This is exemplified by chiaroscuro, the technique in paintings of using radical light-and-dark.

Christmas time! A podcast about how Santa Claus LOOKS --- the history of his visual appearance. St. Nicholas, Thomas Nast, Fred Mizen, myths like Coca-Cola, Luther, the Orthodox Santa, "Twas the night before Christmas," and more including the Swiss Samichlaus and Schmutzli!

The question: What is the problem with Performance Art and Video Art? Are they really, as can seem, so often so bad?

Re-historicizing Pluralism in art. It is claimed to be a unique change and to reign right now, yet it is not so new and has a past. Pluralisms have occurred at least 7 times before.

The slogan of Modernism was Ezra Pound's "Make it new. " Postmodernism (supposedly) rejects this. What is its motto and what could come after that?

There were of course female artists at all times. Most simply have been ignored, or even later removed from mainstream art history. Worst of all, for most of history in the West and the East, it was illegal to instruct or train women to become professional artists at all!