Halloween costumes can be classy, trashy, cartoony, or in the several cases below – artsy! Â After perusing the interwebs for artsy costume ideas, I came across these cute kids… and some adults with some serious art cred. Â I had planned on Cat Woman until I saw that I could not get a costume for less than $60 (major sad face). Â I am now thinking of drawing a unibrow, sticking flowers in my hair, and finding a brooding Diego.
If you are looking for artsy costume ideas, look no further!
Love the soup cans.
A cheap, yet chic costume for dudes
Bringing Mondrian Back!
I think this one would be great with a dude's face (preferably bearded).
The other day in my art history class, we had just moved past the French Realist movement and were centering in on the beginnings of impressionism.
For the last fifteen minutes of class, we were examining this painting:
It looked pretty nice to me. Â Like a post card or the book cover to a Victorian rags-to-riches story. Â What it communicated to me was something along these lines, “Oh, look at these wonderful hats! Â Fluff, fluff, fluff! Â I wonder what’s on The Bachelor tonight. Â I hope that slut from Reno goes home. Â Ay me!”
However, after fifteen minutes of lecture, I was told that such was not the case.
Instead, what this painting is actually communicating, is a commodified young girl who is susceptible to the penetrating male gaze of capitalist France.
What do FEATHERS have to do with the male gaze??!
In literary criticism, examining a piece of literature without any historical context, author’s biographic information, or ideology is part of New Criticism. Â New Critics focus on works of poetry and prose as self-contained entities with meaning in themselves.
All of this commodification talk got me thinking… does a painting have inherent meaning? Â If we don’t know the painter’s original intent, how do assess what the meaning is in the first place?
While I was sitting there, trying to take notes, all I could think to myself was, “I still think the colors and textures are pretty. Â And that this woman is probably nice and sends money to her mom every weekend.”
I was also thinking that I needed some chocolate or something to cheer me up, because Marxism (along with many other -isms) often sucks the positive emotions out of my life like an ideological dementor.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is a statue worth? Â Or a cathedral or an expertly crafted acqueduct?
While writing about the political messages conveyed by the triumphal statues of Roman emperors the other day, I tried to come up with reasons why someone in 2012 should even care about these crumbling relics from a time long passed.
Why do people create visual art? Â Paintings, sculptures, architectural feats of greatness.
I think it is because there are some feelings so deep, some convictions so intense, that no words can adequately convey them. Â (Or, in the words of my art history professor, “Constantine needed something BIG to proclaim that he was emperor. Â So his triumphal arch is kind of his way of saying, “I won! Ha-ha! Â HERE’S my statue!” Â Standing at 21 meters high, with a collage of spolia from previous emperors on its facade, the arch is quite imposing.
"I win! HERE's my statue!"
In addition to empowerment afforded by three-dimensional space in art, I also think that the pre-Colombus, flattened globe of words and text is confining. Â Bound by the gated contrasts of dark and light, with no in-between.
No pools of color, no jutting shards of spears, and no three-dimensional transcendence.
Sometimes, you just need to experience a great painting to feel and know the comfort that someone, somewhere else has experienced the same feelings as you. Â And not only have they experienced these feelings, a gifted artist was able to capture them and immortally frame them in something beautiful.
I think art and art history, is not something to be looked down upon. Â Rather than a frivolous and superfluous study of line and color, it is the fibers of humanity, expressed in line, color, and three dimensional spaces that let our souls breathe. Â It is the liberation of our thoughts from the confining jail cells of text.
Although Marcus Aurelius could have written more books of ‘Meditations’ and philosophy, even he deemed it fit to immortalize a facet of his personality in three-dimensional marble with a powerful cape and commanding horse that doesn’t exactly come across on crumbly second century papyri.
