Geoff Wichert has degrees in critical writing and creative nonfiction. He writes about art to settle the arguments going on in his head.
“Why are the people in Brian Kershisnik’s paintings so ugly?” This question from a visitor to the Central Utah Art Center’s just-concluded exhibit of recent paintings by Kathleen Peterson and Brian Kershisnik sent the director, Adam Bateman, and me searching for an answer. It wouldn’t help to point out that beauty is […]
Glass is unique among the mediums of art for being identified not with a technique or a format but with a material. A glass artist may think of herself as a painter if she focuses on the decoration of two-dimensional surfaces, or a sculptor if she arranges three-dimensional […]
At first sight, Sean Morello’s two-dimensional works seem too slight to support a title that properly belongs to an encyclopedia. But to view What Art Is as a summary is to look through the wrong end of the telescope. Morello, like Art Danto in “The Transfiguration of […]
I. If it has become a cliché that art usurps the place in modern life once held by religion, it’s an ironic cliché, for of all the subjects and sources of our art, religion is surely one of the least respected. In fact, in its purest sense […]
In Doctrine and Covenants, a kind of L.D.S. handbook, Joseph Smith enjoins his followers on venerable theological grounds to practice moderation in all things. Those good people, responding out of impulses set even deeper in human nature, have striven ever since to do twice what he asked of […]
Some sculptors treat language as just another malleable substance, no different from wax or bronze. BYU Sculpture Professor Brian Christensen has chosen to call the dozen new works on display at the Central Utah Art Center Body and Time. Here “and” stands in for a word we lack: […]
