Dr Great Art! Art, Art History, Visual Metaphor, Politics!

A shorter episode, I call a "mini." This time with interesting little facts about Pablo Picasso.

The Blues ethos as a strategy of persistence against melancholy. The Life Blues got me. I had a few slaps upside the head and they affect my art inspiration and production.

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 thou…

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?

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 th…

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 metap…

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 insta…

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 im…

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 i…

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…

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 t…

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 fo…

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 W…