Dr Great Art! Art, Art History, Visual Metaphor, Politics!

Metaphor is the basis of thought, which importantly arises from bodily, cultural and environmental experience. It is embodied in the body, in the world and in the expressions of it, such as visual art. Metaphors we live and create by.

Artists are directly responsible for fashioning their own tropes through the processes of extension, elaboration, composition and/or questioning. They must wrestle with their precursors, who inspired them to be creators in the first place, to do this. Such dialectical struggle, called an 'agon,' is more than simply oedipal. The African spirit Eshu, the trickster patron saint of crossroads, and Jac...

There is a somewhat frequently-heard accusation that Michelangelo forged ancient Roman sculpture at the start of his career. Here is the truth.

How is history constructed? Who makes history? And what will remain in the future from us and our culture? What is the truth? What is fabrication? Isn't a well-told tale more exciting than simple data and facts? Facts are extremely important. Not everything goes --- yet all facts and sources of facts must be closely examined and often criticized. (Art) HistorIES.

A short podcast presenting three ideas from Feminist philosophy useful for art and metaphor: pragmatic action over absolutism, the located self, and finding loopholes in hegemonies to allow creative resistance.

A podcast in preparation for discussions of visual metaphor: one aspect of terminology, trope and metaphor.

A lighter episode relating seven stimulating facts about Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Georgia O'Keeffe.

This episode concerns a troublesome yet seldom acknowledged tendency in the artworld: Sophistry. Why are you in this struggle? Are you an artist or critic or curator simply for careerist "success"? Weren't you actually CALLED to art?

This episode's Artecdote is an explanation of my assertion that art history models are not necessarily master narratives. Art History is often told in versions of one linear story, thus a master narrative. This often delimits thought, sustains oppressive systems and purports to be the truth, allowing no exceptions. On the other hand, the stringent fear of modeling has sometimes lead the less inven...

My Artecdote this episode is the an explanation of my assertion that "Artists Create New Metaphors to Live By." Under the inspiration of Lakoff, Johnson and Turner's Cognitive Metaphor Theory, I describe my assertion that artists create for themselves new metaphors to live by, by creating new metaphors to create with, which viewers can then also use to think with and live by. This I refer to as ar...

A new artistic development: Exhibition Comics and a new compositional form: Iconosequentiality.

An artist who greatly needs to be rediscovered. Not only her name, but her works! Marietta Tintoretta. The daughter of Jacopo Rubusti, aka Tintoretto. Renowned as a great artist in her time, the Late Renaissance, now disappeared.

The concept of "genius" in art has rightly been criticized for its sexism, exaggeration and more. However, it is possible to retain its useful aspects by redefining it as the level of achieved pervasiveness of an artist's metaphor(m).

What constitutes representation in a work of art? The representational nature of visual art is one of its most important, fruitful, and intriguing elements --- yet for very particular reasons.

Giotto, the painter who made the crucial change from the Medieval style thus beginning the Renaissance in art, painted a picture of the Star of Bethlehem which is an image of Halley's comet!

Mongrel Art! Democratic Art! This Dr great Art Artecdote is a description of and plaidoyer for a (Post-Postmodernist) art that is anti-purist, syncretistic, and creolized, unifying a variety of artforms, disciplines, tendencies and philosophies. Artworks involving popular or democratic and street artforms outside the "standard" fine art ones, yet also not eschewing either so-called time-honored, n...

This Dr Great Art Artecdote concerns supposed rules in art, especially painting. It describes how there are really no rules in art, and it decries the obsequiousness of those who believe there are rules and who seek to follow them.

The meaning of every artwork lies in the object itself, not in any commentary concerning it.

Times have changed drastically. Now, what provinciality is has been turned completely around. It is a state of mind, not geography.

This Dr Great Art artecdote concerns the beginning of the period, or transitional subperiod, of art in which we now exist: Postmodernism. It cannot be talked away or ignored, nor should it be worshipped. But we are in it since 1979.

This Dr Great Art artecdote is about a form of definitional conceptualization, paradigms and fuzzy categories, and how that is important to understanding art.

An artecdote about a person: Dr Professor Th. Emil Homerin, an important, inspiring scholar of religion, especially mysticism, especially the Sufis, with significant thoughts concerning art.

There are traditionally Nine Muses and Nine Arts, frequently linked to one another. This is my attempt to concoct a fresh, contemporary version of this system for no darn reason other than pure, cultural fun.

A very short 4 minute episode concerning how this podcast, the accompanying performance-lectures in painting-installations, and indeed the art historian and artist Mark Staff Brandl himself came to be called 'Dr Great Art.'

Syncretism is the blending, layering and uniting of different beliefs of various schools of thought. Easter is the holiday most evidencing syncretistic thought. Mongrel Art is a syncretistic form or art. Democratic Art syncretistically involves people outside the field of art in artistic processes.