Category Archive: Art & Artists
Relatively Delightful
With the fashion collections just around the corner, it seems an appropriate moment to pay homage to Charles Baudelaire, fashion’s first poet, who recognized that fashion is integral to portraying modern times in art, and who swans his way through…
Sugimoto’s Screen Test
I’ve been thinking lately of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto‘s theater series, which he first showed in 1988. They’re mysterious, ornate, forgotten, nostalgic, romantic, and maybe a bit haunted. Sugimoto described his inspiration as a conversation with himself. “Suppose you shoot a whole movie…
So Blue
If I could write Encyclopedia of the Exquisite all over again, I’d make room for Yves Klein and his IKB—that is, the ultramarine color he patented in 1956, International Klein Blue. Like Robert Rauschenberg, whose early 1950s monochromatic paintings do…
Rock On
It’s hammock season. The Victorians and Edwardians brought this 16th century maritime necessity to bourgeois backyard, where they swung with abandon. The item neatly enmeshes several threads running through Encyclopedia of the Exquisite: the illicit thrill of reclining, and of swinging,…
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