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

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 profoun…

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 …

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 histo…

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 d…

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 incorpora…

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 ar…

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…

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 dat…

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 …

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"? W…

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 narr…

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 desc…

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…

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 pervas…

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!