A Time Warp of “Camp”: De Lucchi, Piranesi, & Factum Arte at SDMA

“Piranesi, Rome, and the Arts of Design” is very much like “The Rocky Horror Show.” Like the musical’s pivotal gender bending mad genius character Frank ‘N’ Furter who continuously alters his persona, Giambattista Piranesi (1720-1778) was also a mad genius who perpetually had to alter his persona from architect to printer and an influential designer of the Rococo and Neoclassical periods to finally become an architectural historian.

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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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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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