Geoff Wichert has degrees in critical writing and creative nonfiction. He writes about art to settle the arguments going on in his head.
When confronted by a broadly-brushed lampoon such as Kelsey Harrison’s New Luxury Art Show in Downtown Salt Lake City, it’s tempting to sustain the illusion, play along, which in this case would be writing an ironic review: one that used the same hyperbolic, vacant language, touched on the […]
One of the most compelling breakthroughs in modern linguistics, and a necessary step on the way to proving that language has become genetically programmed in humans, was the realization that all people everywhere speak essentially the same language. Made up of words and rules for combining them, it […]
When the towers—there were more than two—of the World Trade Center fell on 9/11, emergency medical personnel anticipated an avalanche of critical injuries. While the survivors on that day were never counted, responders knew from experience what to expect: eight years before, when a bomb exploded beneath one […]
A sometimes helpful way to conceptualize Modern Art is “old wine in new bottles.” James Joyce, the essential modernist, took a 2,500-year-old epic poem, the “Odyssey,” and repackaged it as a novel—a literary form only a couple of centuries old—that he called “Ulysses,” after the poem’s protagonist, even […]
“Blind Faith” (detail) by Vincent Mattina There isn’t any rule against making art from a personal, as opposed to universal, point of view. Indeed, it could be argued that most good art started out with something private in it that energized the man or woman who made it. […]
In biology, circumstances—what scientists call “niches”—summon particular organisms into being. So it may have been inevitable that BYU and Snow College, two of the principal breeding grounds of Utah art, would each possess a teacher who is also a prolific artist, a keen student of local culture, a […]
“The Set” (detail) by Wren Ross. Sometime around 1970, feminist historians began to make all sorts of discoveries about the primacy of artistic and scientific discoveries during what has been called the Enlightenment. Among these was the realization that, just as artists often perform the difficult early stages […]
Installation view of Cordell Taylor’s Process exhibition at The Gallery at the Main. The gallery on the fourth floor of the City Library includes not only a large interior space but also its exterior walls and the mezzanine-like floor space outside. Normally, it rewards two artists sharing the […]
Once, after we had moved to a new city, I found it helpful to drive my daughter to and from school. In time, her inborn need to be independent led her to public transportation, which she still relies on four decades later, but our pleasure in each other’s […]
“Water Crossing,” 2016, triptych, charcoal on vellum mounted on board, 96″ x 165″ It’s not hard to see why, when BYU Museum of Art’s Curator of American Art Kenneth Hartvigsen and his staff set out to take the measure of artistic responses to the international refugee crisis, they […]
Dana Gluckstein, “Tribal Man in Transition.” Kenya, 1985. Sometimes numbers provide the best grasp of world history, of its sporadic progress and its frequent failures to move ahead. For example, World War II caused an estimated 60 million deaths, which is thought to be the greatest loss of […]
When Madison Donnelly showed her sculpture, “User Centered Design,” at the 2017 Statewide Annual Exhibition, it was outstanding in a field of more conventional works. As a photo that ran in 15 Bytes at the time reveals, even the staff at Rio Gallery seemed to think so: in […]
