Review: Photo/Brut

Photo / Brut, by Bruno Decharme and others, Flammarion in collaboration with the American Folk Art Museum, New York, and abcd, Paris, 320 pages, 2020. ISBN: 978-2080204325. Hardcover, $55 Among the varieties of art brut creation, photography has historically received limited attention. A newly extensive, if not definitive, exploration built around the great ABCD art brut collection of Bruno Decharme takes some steps to remedy that situation. Photo / Brut, the exhibit and catalog, boasts impressive scale, and Decharme’s deep art brut experience gives him standing to help define what art brut photography might mean. That’s not exactly what this

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Review: Unheard Conversations/Carved Coconut Heads

Unheard Conversations: A Wonderful Collection of Carved Coconut Heads, by John Turner, Blurb, 72 pages, 103 color and 11 black-and-white illustrations, 2019. ISBN: 978-1714598229. Paperback, $85 The late John Turner was a pioneering thinker about self-taught and outsider art. He wrote the first book about Howard Finster and more recently this great book about carved coconuts. His collection was remarkable, and remarkably overwhelming when taken in all in at once. But this weekend, Aug. 20-23, those in the Bay Area will have the opportunity to see it and acquire some of it. There are incredible things to be had, not just artwork but

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Roadside Art Tableaus

There are isolated bursts of brilliance all along Western Avenue and other working-class stretches of Chicago’s orderly street grid. And every once in a while you come across a building or a sales lot where the signmaker’s art gives way to something far more ambitious than a simple commercial illustration. Here are three examples — all gone now — where the signage adds up to a large-scale piece of art.

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Work From Home — Who’d A Thought It?

With a grip on the zeitgeist that is shaky at best, I rarely find myself ahead of big trends. But at least once I can claim to have been a halfway decent futurist. This 1981 piece describing the future of work was distributed by Columbia Journalism School’s news service to a handful of small newspapers. A version later appeared in the Santa Barbara News & Review, the first place I worked professionally. At the time the idea of office workers being employed at home was not widely foreseen, but I had come across a news item on a pilot program at

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Mississippi Burning movie poster

Is Ersatz History Good Enough?

Does it matter that the history found in most Hollywood films based on real events and real people is ersatz? Watching 2020’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 and its frequent falsifications, I was reminded of a piece I wrote years ago about how a fake cinematic reality can all too easily substitute for actual historical knowledge. Hollywood producers certainly have the artistic prerogative to not care about rendering an accurate account of historical events, but it’s a choice with consequences (even if often without obvious dramatic rationale). Why? Because the Hollywood version is not only the most vivid account

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A Chicago Nativity In Spectacular Fashion

I’m as guilty as anyone of overusing the concept of “greatest ever,” but this nativity scene is a legitimate candidate for the title. A full-blown, if temporary, art environment, it is the work of retired fashion designer and cosmetologist Jim McCall. You can read about McCall and the site and see more photos in this Block Club Chicago story. More art environments here.

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