Everything is Interesting
Juan Francisco Casas (b. 1976) is a Spanish artist who paints large size oil canvases and blue ballpen drawings where he reproduces images he takes with his camera.
In 2010 he participated, along with artists such as Edward Hopper, Édouard Manet, Chuck Close, and Andreas Gursky, in the impressive display ‘Realismus. Das Abenteuer der Wirklichkeit’ (‘Realism The Adventure of Reality’) in the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung Museum, Munich. He lives and works in Paris and Madrid.
The concept of Cool Japan, along with that of ‘Gross National Cool,’ was coined in 2002 as an expression of Japan’s emergent status as a cultural superpower. Gaining broad exposure in the media and academia, the brand of ‘Cool Japan’ has been adopted by the Japanese government as well as trade bodies seeking to exploit the commercial capital of the country’s culture industry. It has been described as a form of soft power, ‘the ability to indirectly influence behaviour or interests through cultural or ideological means.’
In a 2002 article in ‘Foreign Policy’ entitled ‘Japan’s Gross National Cool,’ Douglas McGray wrote of Japan ‘reinventing superpower’ as its cultural influence expanded internationally despite the economic and political problems of the ‘lost decade.’ Surveying youth culture and the role of manga, anime, fashion, film, consumer electronics, architecture, cuisine, J-pop, and phenomena of cuteness such as Hello Kitty, McGray highlighted Japan’s considerable soft power, posing the question of what message the country might project. He also argued that Japan’s recession may even have boosted its national cool, due to the partial discrediting of erstwhile rigid social hierarchies and big-business career paths.
The term middlebrow describes both a certain type of easily accessible art, often literature, as well as the population that uses art to acquire culture and class that is usually unattainable. First used by the British satire magazine ‘Punch’ in 1925, middlebrow is derived as the intermediary between highbrow and lowbrow, terms derived from phrenology.
Middlebrow has famously gained notoriety from derisive attacks by Dwight Macdonald, Virginia Woolf, and to a certain extent, Russell Lynes. It has been classified as a forced and ineffective attempt at cultural and intellectual achievement, as well as characterizing literature that emphasizes emotional and sentimental connections rather than literary quality and innovation.
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Culture industry is a term coined by critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), who argued in the chapter of their book ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,’ that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods – through film, radio and magazines – to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.
Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness. This was reference to an earlier demarcation in needs by Herbert Marcuse.
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Bathos [bey-thos] (Greek: ‘depth’) is an abrupt transition in style from the exalted to the commonplace, producing a ludicrous effect. While often unintended, bathos may be used deliberately to produce a humorous effect. If bathos is overt, it may be described as Burlesque or mock-heroic.
As used in English bathos originally referred to a particular type of bad poetry, but it is now used more broadly to cover any seemingly ridiculous artwork or bad performance. It should not be confused with pathos, a mode of persuasion within the discipline of rhetoric, intended to arouse emotions of sympathy and pity.
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Camp is an aesthetic sensibility that regards something as appealing or humorous because of its deliberate ridiculousness. The concept is closely related to kitsch, and things with camp appeal may also be described as being ‘cheesy.’
When the usage appeared, in 1909, it denoted: ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical, and effeminate behaviour, and, by the middle of the 1970s, the definition comprised: banality, artifice, mediocrity, and ostentation so extreme as to have perversely sophisticated appeal. American writer Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Notes on ‘Camp” (1964) emphasised its key elements as: artifice, frivolity, naïve middle-class pretentiousness, and ‘shocking’ excess. Camp as an aesthetic has been popular from the 1960s to the present.
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Kitsch [kich] (loanword from German) is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that are unoriginal.
Kitsch also refers to the types of art that are aesthetically deficient (whether or not being sentimental, glamorous, theatrical, or creative) and that make creative gestures which merely imitate the superficial appearances of art through repeated conventions and formulae. Excessive sentimentality often is associated with the term.
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Nero is a British electronic music act consisting of Daniel Stephens and Joe Ray with Alana Watson a vocalist, who are best known for producing drum and bass, dubstep and house. Daniel Stephens and Joe Ray were both born in 1984 and spent their childhood in suburban Northwood, London.
Ray played classical guitar and Stephen, encouraged by his jazz-loving father, played cello. By the time a mutual friend introduced them at the age of 15, Stephens was attending the specialist music school at Pimlico. Outside school both were making electronic music on home computers. They began working together at 17, setting up a studio in Stephens’ bedroom.
Stippling [stip-uhl-ing] is the creation of a pattern simulating varying degrees of solidity or shading by using small dots. Such a pattern may occur in nature and these effects are frequently emulated by artists. In a drawing or painting, the dots are made of pigment of a single color, applied with a pen or brush; the denser the dots, the darker the apparent shade—or lighter, if the pigment is lighter than the surface. This is similar to—but distinct from—pointillism, which uses dots of different colors to simulate blended colors.
In printmaking, dots may be carved out of a surface to which ink will be applied, to produce either a greater or lesser density of ink depending on the printing technique. Stippling may also be used in engraving or sculpting an object even when there is no ink or paint involved, either to change the texture of the object, or to produce the appearance of light or dark shading depending on the reflective properties of the surface; for instance, stipple engraving on glass produces areas that appear brighter than the surrounding glass.
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Divisionism [dih-vizh-uh-niz-uhm] (also called Chromoluminarism) was the characteristic style in Neo-Impressionist painting defined by the separation of colors into individual dots or patches which interacted optically. By requiring the viewer to combine the colors optically instead of physically mixing pigments, divisionists believed they were achieving the maximum luminosity scientifically possible.
Georges Seurat founded the style around 1884 as chromoluminarism, drawing from his understanding of the scientific theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and Charles Blanc, among others. Divisionism developed along with another style, pointillism, which is defined specifically by the use of dots of paint and does not necessarily focus on the separation of colors.
Dan Reisinger (b. 1934) is an Israeli designer of graphics, exhibitions, and stage sets. He was born in Serbia, into a family of painters and decorators active in Austria-Hungary and the Balkans. Most family members died in the Holocaust, including his father. He immigrated to Israel in 1949. Reisinger initially lived in a transit camp and then worked as a house painter. In 1950 at age 16, he was accepted as a student—its youngest at the time—at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.
He graduated in 1954 and was inducted into the Israeli military for mandatory service. He was the art director for the Air Force’s books and other publications. While there, he attended a class on postage-stamp design taught by Abram Games, who became his mentor and friend. Subsequently, he traveled, studied, and worked in Europe: from 1957 in Brussels and then onto London where, 1964–66, studied stage and three-dimensional design at the Central School of Art and Design (today the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design), designed posters for Britain’s Royal Mail. Then in 1966, he returned permanently to Israel and established a studio.
Ben Frost is an Australian visual artist who places common iconic images from advertising, entertainment, and politics into juxtapositions that are often confrontational and controversial. The collaborative exhibition ‘Colossus’ with Roderick Bunter in 2000 at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane featured a 12m x 2.4m mural by the artists, called ‘Where Do You Want To Go Today?’
Containing controversial imagery, including masturbating cartoon characters among a pastiche of advertising icons, the work was a statement on society’s continuing loss of innocence. In the final week of the exhibition, a disgruntled viewer entered the gallery and slashed one of the paintings with a knife.’ In 2005 he started the online art store and blog portal ‘Stupid Krap,’ which continues to support and represent a number of notable Australian emerging artists.
