This week The Art Assignment tackles the intersection of art and our changing climate. Throughout history, art has helped reveal the climate around us and highlight our fragile relationship to it. The Art Assignment looks at navigational charts from the Marshall Islands, Katsushika Hokusai’s "Under the Wave off Kanagawa", Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s "Hunters in the Snow," Mali's Great Mosque of Djenné, the Ise Shrine in Japan, steadily sinking Venice, the cave paintings of Lascaux, and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, among others.
Latest Art News
Last week a group of foundations came together to ensure the preservation of an important trove of American history.
The Art History Babes provide an intro to Ancient Greek Kouroi and Korai statues and throw out some bizarre theories about what the Peplos Kore actually held—an arrow? An apple? The universe? Listen and find out.
How much do you know about Van Gogh’s Sunflowers?
Filmmaker and art connoisseur John Waters has just two words for would-be art collectors: Monkey Art.
If you aim to invest in today’s overheated art market, he says in a new book, primate paintings are the way to go.
“Only one collectible art movement from the past hasn’t been reinvented, hoarded, or parodied,” he writes. “Want to speculate in the art market? I’m telling you what to buy–monkey art. Yes, paintings by chimpanzees.”
When Italian university student Piergiorgio Castellani booked his winter-break holiday in New York in 1988, he expected to see major artworks in museums–not major living artists walking nonchalantly down the street.
Let’s talk about BIG ART. In this super-sized episode, Nat, Jen and Gin discuss art on a large-scale. From the tallest file cabinet in the world, to the eerie work of Ron Mueck, this episode deals with big stuff and why they like it (or don’t).
Nat and Corrie cover the Forbidden City in Beijing, China in this Art History BB. As the imperial palace and political epicenter of China during the Ming & Qing dynasties, the Forbidden City housed the Emperor, his family, and his concubines. On this episode the babes discuss elements of the Forbidden City, as well as the lives of its inhabitants.
Bob Ross painted more than 1,000 landscapes for his television show — so why are they so hard to find? Solving one of the internet’s favorite little mysteries.
As bubonic plague ravaged seventeenth-century England, the afflicted would find a red cross painted on their door, a warning for visitors to stay out. If, on the other hand, a house had been shown mercy while the rest of the neighborhood succumbed–a matter of happenstance more than anything since no one knew the first thing about disease transmission or treatment–it was cause for decorative commemoration.
