An Artist of the Floating World

Alternative Rappers? Another way that Outkast challenged notions of authenticity was through their defiance towards conceptions of performative blackness within Hip Hop. Here, I will use E. Patrick Johnson’s framework, as well as how authenticity is constructed based on sound, look and feel in tandem, to illustrate how OutKast resisted this limited view of Hip Hop legitimacy (Grazian). Perceptions of performative blackness connected to sound, look and feel stem from urban inner-city ghetto life…

or not you have listened to Nirvana, everyone knows the memorable Nevermind album cover with the naked baby floating in the water. Lead singer of Nirvana, Kurt Cobain is known for his zen personality and deep thinking. Everything he wrote came from his heart and has a distinct meaning to him, his ability to express his emotions through rock music makes him one of the most well-known artists. The album accounts as media due to the fact that Kurt Cobain used his platform to confront…

It is cliché for an artist to take their life’s experiences and express them boldly and without apology. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was no exception. His work seems to be self-centered although it was about humanity as a whole. I believe that through his confusion he felt qualified to represent all people even when they were on opposite ends of the spectrum. Much of this is expressed in the irony of his poetry. Such a style made him one of, if not, the best poet in American history. “From song of…

Analyzing Critical Thinking It seems like there are countless humans floating through life, not seeing the big picture, like the world is revolving around us. It is vital that we all learn how to look past the end of our noses. David Wallace talks about the importance of actually understanding how to think, instead of living life ungrounded, unconscious. The need to be conscious and aware to choose what we are paying attention to and how to construct meaning from all of our experiences is…

She told me at age seven it was her mother’s mother who left this world. At age eleven, it was her grandmother and best friend who passed in her arms. When she was twelve, her grandfather died and her mother broke. At fourteen, she gave up and said “fuck it.” “I thought, and still sometimes think, that death follows me around,” explained Stephanie Rachel Guttenplan. Guttenplan is a surrealist photographer, based out of New York, who continues to experiment with different uses of a variety of…

Alessandro Filipepi, more famously known as Sandro Botticelli, led the artistic movements in Florence’s Early Renaissance era with his works’ enigmatic nature. His placement as the court artist of Lorenzo de Medici, the man in charge of the Tuscan city-state from 1469-1492, allowed him to carry even more influence over his contemporaries than through his paintings alone. During his time under the Medici family’s patronage, he created some of the most cryptic and revolutionary works of art anyone…

from reality. “Radtke is not an artist who also writes a little or a writer who scrawls but a master of both prose narrative and visual art. Like memory, the narrative loosens the binds of chronology, playing hopscotch through the author’s girlhood. College, formative years as an artist, and apocalyptic fantasy of her current home in New York. In a way, what she has done in this impressive book is to revive the dead and recover the lost while illuminating a world in flux, in which change is the…

Coradal-Cougat was a famous Spanish artist who created the classic melancholy cover F. Scott Fitzgerald used for his award winning novel, The Great Gatsby. The striking cover is called “Celestial Eyes” and was painted in 1924. According to the Oxford dictionary, celestial means “positioned in or relating to the sky, or outer space as observed in astronomy”. The title the cover was given is very straightforward and practical, for the haunting face he drew almost looks as if it is floating in the…

The Art of Advertisement William Bernbach, an American advertising director, who was one of the founders of the famous international advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, once said, “Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.” Companies have been always trying to master this art. Major companies spend millions of dollars on advertisement, trying to convey their products to the costumer. Good advertisement is what distinguishes between the…

My initial reaction upon looking over Turner’s “Slave Ship” was that it appeared to be a beautiful landscape. The way the sky looks over the ship and the horizon line is really striking and powerful. However, as you start to look down you start to see the reason for the name of “Slave Ship”. Along the bottom of the painting you can see body parts of humans in the water. There are hands and feet, the foot on the bottom right has a shackle still attached to the ankle and there appear to be fish…