Visual Arts There is a delicious solipsism in art whose only purpose is to boggle the eye, and nowhere is this self-pleasuring more flagrant than in op art. The movement...   More

Visual Arts Since the advent of photography, when French painter Delaroche reportedly declared, “From today, painting is dead,” thinkers have been busy burying and exhuming the enduring art form. Curato   More

Visual Arts On this yearlong eve of the Mayan apocalypse, as we bury our faces in digital displays, what is the relevance of the old-fashioned objet d’art? Can it engage the mind and uplift the spirit? Kris   More

Visual Arts Launch Pad Gallery, which opened in December 2005 and closes with its current show, has always staked out unique terrain within Portland’s visual-arts ecosphere. Its physical location is in So   More

Visual Arts First came hieroglyphs, then epic poems, stage plays and operas. Then there were books, newspapers, movies, radios and televisions. Now, smartphones, iPads and Kindles. The methods by which we r   More

Visual Arts In a state where hot-springs skinny dipping and strip-club flesh ogling are de rigueur, can an art exhibition about naked bodies pique, tweak or shock anyone? Not really, as it turns out. But Fr   More

Visual Arts “Live in fragments no longer,” E.M. Forster urged in Howards End. “Only connect.” Today, 102 years after the novel was published, we increasingly connect by tweeting, streaming and texti   More

Visual Arts If the Playboy Mansion were plopped down into the forests of Middle-earth and redecorated by Donald Trump, it would probably wind up looking and feeling like Tom Cramer’s woodsy, sensual fanta   More

Visual Arts Oh, how we love to tart up death! Out with the blood, in with the embalming fluid, pancake the face, rouge the cheeks, and suddenly Grandma looks 10 years younger than when she died! The pervers   More

Visual Arts It’s an image that could keep you up at night: a young man, his wife, and their child lay atop the bolted entrance to a family crypt. The parents’ eyes are closed as the child rests limply on    More