Posted inArt

How One Regional Craft Museum Is Expanding Its Horizons

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft in Louisville has spent the last couple of years staking out a place in discussions occurring in contemporary art circles about the line dividing art and craft. The recent exhibition PRESS: Artist and Machine was a romantic show focused on illuminating the relationship between 19th-century printing-press technology and 20th- and 21st-century art production.

Posted inArt

Making a Heaven in Hell: The Angel of the Odd’s Dark Romanticism

PARIS — With the bloody revolutions of the late 1700s, the mood in Europe was apprehensive and brooding about the future. Perhaps then it’s no surprise that the art from that time has a certain gloominess to it as well. Yet what is unexpected is the strange beauty certain artists began to give their visions of horror, whether it was embracing the devil in the same way Milton did in Paradise Lost as an alluring prince of darkness, or portraying the apocalypse with a light that was inverted to our world, but curiously enticing. It’s this deviant use of beauty that is celebrated in L’Ange du Bizarre (The Angel of the Odd), an exhibition draped over the galleries of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris that beckons with its Dark Romanticism.