Art

Upcoming talk at Representational Art Conference, Ventura

I’ll be giving an invited talk at The Representational Art Conference in Ventura, California, from October 14-17, 2012, hosted and organized by California Lutheran University. My talk will include themes from my essay “Why Art Became Ugly,” first published in Navigator magazine and subsequently translated into in German [pdf], Korean [pdf], and Spanish. Other invited […]

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Three new novelists

Over the spring and summer I read three enjoyable books, all by first-time authors of fiction. Looking forward to more from them. Pietros Maneos, The Italian Pleasures of Gabriele Paterkallos. A lushly Romantic series of letters by young American poet on an odyssey to Rome — both contemporary Rome and the idealized and historical city

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Carlin Romano’s America the Philosophical

Over the years I’ve enjoyed and learned from many of Carlin Romano’s articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He can do good philosophical reporting. So I picked up America the Philosophical, and I was disappointed. Romano’s thesis is that the United States is a nation of vigorous philosophical activity and — contrary to the

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Artistic Genius — Florence, Italy

Shooting the last two days in Florence, where republican politics, relatively free markets and innovative business, relaxed religion, and humanistic philosophy laid the groundwork for the explosion of artistic creativity in the 1400s — Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Ghirlandaio, Leonardo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, and the list goes on. Awesome. Visual delights everywhere, a strong sense of living

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