Being Alone: Paintings by James Chronister at Lux

Being alone while lost in a forest or feeling tiny in a vast space is a natural cause for melancholic apprehension. Not being in control, not being the master of the situation, being at the mercy of nature―or worse, being at the mercy of God himself―falls into the artistic tradition called the “Romantic Sublime.” The master…

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MCASD’s “Lifelike” Exhibition is Fun for All

A drip of black paint that is, in reality, made from an actual black diamond, several cardboard boxes that are not really made of cardboard, and a loud film of a downpour of rain that actually features no actual rain are all included in the exhibition “Lifelike” now on display at the Museum of Contemporary…

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Caravaggio at LACMA (and in San Diego?)

Could a Caravaggio painting, which turned out not to be a Caravaggio, become a Caravaggio painting again? If this all sounds very confusing, that is because it is! This “now you see it, now you don’t, now you might see it again” scenario is actually fairly common in the art world’s circle of scholarly debate.…

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Athenaeum Presents Confounding Art by Joyce Cutler-Shaw

  Artworks influenced by medical research and inspired by a concern for our water supply can either quench or parch a viewer’s intellectual thirst. In her current exhibition What Comes to Mind: Nature-Human Nature and Visual Translation at La Jolla’s Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, artist Joyce Cutler-Shaw contends with disparate issues such as death,…

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Masterworks from China’s Suzhou Museum at SDMA

If parts of Stonehenge and paintings by both Michelangelo and Raphael were at the San Diego Museum of Art, would you go?  Objects as mysterious as Stonehenge and artwork as great as those by the famous Renaissance masters are all apart of Chinese history. Stonehenge, a colossal arrangement of stones in Great Britain, is still…

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