i'm pretty sure the "cat erection" is a tail. cats (and other animals) tend to do that when they are scared.
i was hoping for some interesting insights from someone who is knowledgable about art, but am disappointed to be reading nonsensical ranting with no point.
I have to agree with Swearengen. One would never know from your writing that Anthony Van Dyck, a former apprentice of Ruben's, was indeed a great painter and portraitist. Jen, looking at Old Master paintings requires work and study, continued exposure, comparison and cross referencing, and a willingness to step outside of one's comfort zone in the present. Your post-modern ironical quips bring nothing to our understanding of these works, save confirmation that you enjoy wallowing in your own prejudice and conceit. To quote Robert Henri "Don't get cheeky with the Old Masters. If they didn't have something, they wouldn't be Old Masters."
This post, like many of Graves's posts, is simply an opportunity to remind us how much she loves black people, and how silly and pretentious white European males are. And privilege. Can't forget something about privilege.
Girls Dressing a Kitten by Candlelight is quite amazing. Replace the candle with a lamp, replace the girls' society dresses with contemporary clothes, and this would be indistinguishable from modern girls of any class playing with their pet. The angry looking kitten just completes the image and ads a lot of unexpected humor. I guess not much has changed in terms of how kids entertain themselves in 200+ years. I did this to my cat as a kid.
Two Girls Dressing a Kitten is good. Unlike stiff, vaguely racist paintings of noblepeople that nobody's given a shit about for three hundred years (make fun of those all you want), it's recognizably human, and unlike most modern art, it has a sense of playfulness that makes sense to everybody, not just people who've read postmodern philosophy. It's better than any of the post-WW II stuff in Elles, at least.
SAM clearly has a case of Downton Abbey syndrome. The only reason I ever went into Kenwood House was to use the bathroom. Of course if I'd known about the erectile aspect of it all...
2 things. Cats always sell, always. And I'm surprised you spiffed Turner. While he defines cognitive dissonance I was disappointed to realize how merely crazy he seems to me.
@6 and so on...sad I know, and pretty pathetic. That was long ago determined. Jen does not have the knowledge nor affinity for anything that is not relevant to her position as arbiter and lover of all that is sensationalist, cool, hip, and now in our art world-screw the rest! She's sort of the TMZ of the NW art scene all tied in to our social scene and it's artist hipsters-get it? In other words, the PEOPLE magazine of it all. I mean could you REALLY imagine Jen Graves opining on a sublime Rembrandt self portrait without sounding like a total art history student hack? Hysterical! Anything in the past is clearly tired,irrelevant, uninspired, and utterly unimportant to her so why bother-right Jen?
I must get my reading glasses.
File:An_Experiment_on_a_Bird_in_an_Air_Pump_by_Joseph_Wright_of_Derby,_1768.jpg">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:An_Exp…
i was hoping for some interesting insights from someone who is knowledgable about art, but am disappointed to be reading nonsensical ranting with no point.
is this some kind of feminist thing?