In Northern Italy, the performance-art duo Fossick Project - illustrator Cecilia Valagussa and musician Marta Del Grandi - is finding a way to re-invent their work in the times of lockdown and coronavirus.

Both within and outside the academic realm, those pursuing the arts or trying to develop an artistic career are not taken seriously and are often ridiculed. Art degree programs and ambitious scientific projects are being dropped left and right. It’s a shame that there is a lack of funding and genuine care for such initiatives, both at the governmental level and in the general public. This issue persists even where creative ambitions should be openly supported. I recall a personal experience in high school when I spoke to an adviser about entering the music program at the college I planned to attend. I was met with a sarcastic, condescending response: “Oh that’s right, you’re going to be a big rock star, uh huh... sure, sure”, which was followed up by advice for an alternate plan. And I know I’m not the only one who has been asked the ever-popular question by older generations: “Oh you’re a musician, but what’s your real job?” Wipe that smirk off your face boomer, we all know you hate your job.

Ben Vautier is an artist not only associated with the artists of the Fluxus Movement in art history, but also those artists out of Nice, France in the 1960s. These artists out of Nice can be analyzed through the lens of The Society of the Spectacle (1967) --DeBord’s Marxist-based philosophy of economy. Ben Vautier’s Window in particular seems less resonant with the Fluxus ideals of many of his other works, especially when analyzed in the same terms as Arman’s accumulation pieces or Yves Klein’s blue monochrome paintings- and several other works of early 1960’s artists that will be mentioned throughout the essay. However, this analysis of Ben’s Window and ‘the spectacle’ changes when looking through the differences between his 1962 living sculpture in The Festival of Misfits exhibition and the 1993 exhibition of Ben’s Window at the Walker Art Center.

Analyzing a constellation of artists in Nice, France, during the late 1950s and early 1960s-- such as Arman, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, and Ben Vautier as well as Claes Oldenburg in New York at the same time-- it becomes apparent that the art of the time is interested in a dialogue about consumer culture and the impact that consumers have on the art market, as well as the post-war conventions of art gallery display especially the gallery window. Arman’s accumulation pieces, however, suggest not only a commentary on institutional conventions of artistic display, but also suggest a commentary on other types of conventional uses of the vitrine as a way to display and categorize objects. Arman’s work with vitrines brings up the convention of displaying artifacts within an anthropological or natural history museum, which can be compared with a display model in a store and can further be compared with an art object in a fine art museum. His work also suggests correlations among the vitrine, the storefront, and the gallery window. This triangulation leads viewers of Arman’s work to understand how collectable and recycled objects function as ‘unusable, yet sellable.’ This is best seen in the two to three years when the French New Realists invaded the New York 1962 New Realists exhibition out of Sidney Janis Gallery pointing to their contradictory mechanisms of display.

When I was a senior in college, I finally wrote and directed my very first full-length play. At the showcase of its staged reading, I invited the audience to a short talkback afterwards to ask for the audiences thoughts and opinions on how the play could be improved (as a practice I'd like to try going forward in my playwriting career). One audience member chimed in and said:

A good book to own, in my opinion, is 'crash course in art' by Eva Howarth, and I must say, it's an eye-opener. The book begins with several outstanding medieval paintings - mainly angels in gilded frames - and moves through the stunning works of Michelangelo - which we have all wondered at - onto the famous artists of the Romantic era, where animals battle in fierce combat and seem to storm out of the pages, where ladies sit with skirts ruffled around them, where lords recline in elegant homes. Things go downhill a little at the end of the nineteenth century, where beautiful realism becomes harsher brush-strokes, but it's still beautiful art.

I wrote this story on my first ever University trip to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. We were asked by our lecturers to find a piece of art that stands out to us. The Staffordshire Saxon was the first piece we saw as we walked in. And for some reason he stuck in my mind. I walked around for hours with my classmates until we came to the little classroom area they usually let primary school children use. People were abuzz with the photo's they'd taken and what they were going to write about. I knew from the first moment I saw him that I would write my piece about the Saxon.

Once known as, Manga Studio, Clip Studio Paint Pro offers an impressive amount of professional drawing/illustration and layout tools for digital artist, especially comic artist. Starting at $59.99, Clip Studio Studio Paint Pro, is the budget version of Clip Studio Paint EX. The Ex version has few number of advanced features the Pro version does not have, most nobility the animation tools and multi-page tool to help organize your comic book pages.

As art expresses an individual's skills, creativity and imagination, we fail to recognize that everything around us is art. The past, the present and all things to come is a form of art. The Gordon Parks Foundation preserves the work of Gordon Parks, an American photojournalist. During the 1940s, he would mainly document issues surrounding African Americans, civil rights and poverty. In September of 1958, a photo essay of Gordon Parks was published. It was titled “The Restraints: Open and Hidden”. According to the Gordon Parks Foundation, the photo-essay “documented the everyday activities and rituals of one extended African American family living in the rural South under Jim Crow segregation.” Parks had a collection of pictures in which he called the “Segregation Story”. Within that collection, there was a specific picture that stood out the most. Taken at the Airline Terminal in Atlanta, Georgia in 1956, Parks took a picture of an emotionless African American maid holding a white baby while sitting next to a very stylish white lady, who also seems to be stone-faced. But something I noticed was that the white lady was sitting one seat away from the African American maid. The relationship between the two ladies seemed to be nothing more than an employee and employer. As Parks was assigned to do an everyday life on one extended African American family, this was one of the pictures he captured. I was very intrigued and full of the question by this picture. Although segregation was very popular back then, it was intriguing how it was okay for the African Americans to raise and take of white people’s babies, but it wasn’t okay for them to use the same facilities or even water fountains as the whites.

I have given it some thought over the years on why art is important and the answer is simply that there are going to be different reasons for different people. I think that most of us, however, can agree that it does have its place and purpose in society.

Salvador Dali (1904-89) was the leading Surrealist painter and sculptor of the 20th century, as well known for his flamboyant personality and turned-up-at-the-ends moustache as his works of art.

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was a pioneer of the modern realism movement in the United States. During a long career as an artist, Hopper had known both depression and success, and “Nighthawks”, painted in 1942, dates from one of his more productive periods when he was financially secure, in good health, and untroubled in his personal life.