Twain-inspired Video by Jan Kather finalist for Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Contest

Vote for Jan Kather’s Video Submission to the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship’s 2019 “Who Wrote Shakespeare? Video Contest

“The Obscenest Picture The World Possesses”: A Twainian Homage to John Berger, George Michael, David Bowie, Prince

On exhibit on the terrace level of Elmira College’s Gannett-Tripp Library is an oil painting titled Head of Titian’s Venus 2015 by Elmira artist Dan Reidy. The large scale oil painting references the famous Venus of Urbino, a 1538 oil painting by Italian master Titian that was described by Mark Twain in A Tramp Abroad (1880) as “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses.” Unlike Twain, Reidy focuses on Venus’s gaze, rather than […]

Mark Twain & Controversial Art

Last year American artist Charles Ray created a stir with his commissioned figurative sculpture Huck and Jim. Originally meant to be permanently installed along New York City’s High Line in the public plaza outside the new Whitney Museum, art critic Jerry Saltz informs us that Ray’s proposal was declined because the work would “offend non-museumgoing visitors.” Saltz goes on to explain that Huck and Jim is “a 21st-century sculptural masterpiece…. a classically traditional Western figurative […]