Author: michaelakokkinos

I decided to visit an art gallery called, The Hole, where certain exhibits are highlighted for a few months. When I went, Andy Dixon’s Exhibit, “Joy”, was being presented, who is a self taught contemporary Canadian artist. Dixon’s purpose was to reshuffle the original classic tropes of Greek mythology in which it portrays the taboo relationship between fine art, luxury, decadence, and patronage to demonstrate the entanglement between art and commerce. These artworks Dixon created may seem to reflect art history in Ancient Greece, but they actually curate our relationship with art history. He explores the question of what is art and what is expensive and how money distorts the history behind the painting. 

This is well presented in his artwork of four hugely painted on shirts called, Moschino Zip-up (2021), Hermes Blouse (2021), Versace Shirt (2019), and Versace Blouse (2021). Dixon uses bright and contrasting colors overlapping one another to highlight the main aspects of the shirts. By using expensive brands and painting over them, he underlines the connection between art and wealth. Artists want to try to make their painting luxurious so that they can have buyers and make a profit off of what they created. Therefore, Dixon believes that the second an artist makes an artwork to get money from it, the artwork is no longer pure. The desire to have a connection or possibility of being wealthy corrupts the artist, as well as the aspect of what really makes art, art. The purpose of art is to experience your ideals and values to show others what you think, and allow them to interpret them the way they want to as well, but when artists are rewarded for what they create, does that painting have a meaning anymore. They start to simply create just to make something that will get them money. Making an artwork that only a few elites would enjoy is dissolute to the majority of regular people who want to envision the art and resonate with it. This is well described by Dixon in which he states, “You don’t like it? Well that’s just because the work is too complex for the average person to understand…”. When art becomes an object of simply making profit, then the vision behind the art is lost. 

Furthermore, Dixon also emphasizes the idea of making everyday scenarios comedic whilst showing the truth behind wealth and privilege. He uses bright, flamboyant colors to exaggerate the visuals to show irony behind it. This additionally reminds me of the cultural movement during the Baroque era where there was an intense use of imagery and dramatic styles being used to demonstrate realism. An example of this would be his artwork “Yolo 🙂 (2023)” which illustrates mythological baby angels dancing around, and then “Yolo 🙁 (2023)“ which shows the dark reality of what happened through the use of memento mori skulls in replace of the angels. These artworks paired together represent the ignorance of wealthy artists and the desire to die famous. They can party and exploit the money they receive but in the end, it won’t be worth it. This reminds me of Vincent Van Gogh who never cared about parties or was arrogant about his work. He simply wanted the attention and love from a girl but he was unable to get it because he never was able to sell any paintings. Even though he died in poverty, he was able to become one of the most famous artists in the whole world. Pablo Picasso was also painting during this era and was highly famous but he never achieved a lot. He was always famous and able to sell his paintings but what Van Gogh achieved in his short career is astonishing. He was able to turn his pain and suffering into something beautiful and did not care to go down in history as a famous artist, even though that is what happened. Picasso’s art, based on the themes of Dixon’s paintings, has little meaning because it was painted to simply get money. 

This exhibit was highly enlightening once I was able to read about what each of the paintings suggested and what Dixons main goal was. The exhibit, Joy, provided free Andy Dixon postcards with his artwork, as well as a sheet of paper that provided his reasoning behind his paintings. The Hole art gallery is an interesting place to visit since it only highlights one specific artist at a time so I was able to gather which paintings were his. The exhibit was well curated because each wall had one of his paintings and the walls matched the color scheme of his artworks. There also was a separate room for his humongous jackets which I was not expecting once I walked in. This exhibit was educational because I have never heard about an artist who discusses the issues between art and money and how when it’s correlated, it diminishes the meanings behind the artist’s visions. I would definitely go again to see what other small business artists have in mind since this experience made me rethink what popular artists had in mind for their art. 

Ching Chong Chinaman by Lauren Yee portrays a Chinese-American family who are completely whitewashed and are racist to another Chinese man, who they call Ching Chong. Each character in the play eventually tries to discover their cultural identity and realize how they were trying to blend in so hard to American culture. The desire to try to be part of the majority manifested chaos in their family and led to shocking discoveries about who they really are. This can be shown through the eldest daughter of the family, Desdemona, who is trying to find her cultural identity through her application process to Princeton. 

In the beginning of the play whilst taking a family portrait, Desdemona is illustrated as educated and conscious of social inequalities when her dad, Ed, tried to support the Manifest Destiny. In Scene 2 once the Chinese man enters, she also tries to tell her mom, Grace, that she cannot call the Chinese man, or J, “Ching Chong” since it’s a racial slur and that they cannot keep him here to be her brothers, Uptons, pet. Throughout all this, Desdemona is stressing out about her grade in BC Calculus and how Princeton cares about it. 

However, Desdemona’s character starts to shift in perspective the longer J stays when she told Ed to not speak, look, or acknowledge J because he can’t speak English. In Scene 5, this is further deepened when Desdemona is going over her essay for Princeton about a Korean schoolgirl orphan named Kim Lee Park. At first the essay starts off as Desdemona being a savior for Kim Lee Park and helping her purchase a yak that kept her warm in the winter and providing her food and transportation. Then, when Desdemona needs more words and Kim Lee Park doesn’t want to help anymore, she slaps her and forces her to give more ideas. After this, Desdemona goes to Upton and tells him he can’t use J as an indentured servant unless J also does her math homework. 

In Scene 11 when Desdemona is at her Princeton interview, she realizes she is not Chinese enough and tries to discover her identity and catch up on it. When Ed didn’t provide enough information on her Chinese heritage, she decided to do a DNA test and found out that her family is also Mexican. She then goes to Mexico for her quinceanera and tells her father she wants to be a person of “color” color. However, Desdemona finds out she’s adopted and is actually Korean and goes on a rampage but then calms down and ends the play with her and Upton saying Merry Christmas.

Desdemona’s character shocked me throughout this play because I expected her to act differently from her parents and to try to educate them on racial issues but in reality she was also participating in it. In each scene, we are revealed another aspect about her that makes her seem absurd. Her actions are aggressive because when she was stressed, she slapped her Korean “friend” and her overall attitude throughout the dialogue is seemingly ignorant. She tries to pretend to be educated and that she’s benefitting the world with her charity and insight when she’s actually just being insensitive by doing so. She tries so hard to be oppressed or to have something about her standout when she should have been trying to celebrate her own culture rather than others. This play really portrays how hard it is for families to try to conform to American culture and society and in the process they end up losing their own background because they just want to be accepted. 

Refugees are primarily people who flee their original country, to go elsewhere in order to be protected. Many refugees need to escape due to persecution of their race, nationality, religion, politics, or because of conflicts happening within their country. Due to tough immigration laws and struggles to get citizenship, many successfully escaped refugees stay quiet about what they went go through because of the risk of getting sent back to their country. In Ramussen’s animation film, Flee, he tells the story of Amin Nawabi who has never told anyone what has happened to him and how his experiences still linger with him today since he still fears the possibilities. 

In the film, Flee, Ramussen decides to start off the story with the earliest memory of Nawabi. During this reenactment, he plays over “Take on Me” to express the joyful memories that he had in Afghanistan and uses brighter toned colors. Ramussen consistently uses different styles of music in certain parts of the story being told by Nawabi to show the current mood of how he feels as he is telling it. For instance, around the 22 minute mark, Ramussen uses sad, monophonic orchestral music when going over how Nawabi had to flee his home while the Taliban went to invade Kabul. Furthermore, Ramussen also uses different artistic/animation styles when going over events. 

When Nawabi talked about his process from fleeing from Russia to get to Sweden originally with his mom and older brother, the animation gets quite darker in tone since it is not a blissful memory. Additionally, when he started talking about his mothers fear of drowning, the animation style shifted to silhouettes moving really fast to show how it is an imagined thought of what could’ve happened. When his sisters went to Sweden by themselves, he started talking about how the human traffickers are psychopaths and illustrated what possibly happened on that cargo they were on. To summarize, Ramussen uses his original animation technique to illustrate what happened to Nawabi that he experienced but uses empty faced silhouettes when it is something that happened to someone else or is a supposed thing that happened to narrate the story. 

By utilizing all these styles, Ramussen is able to accurately portray who is involved and how the speaker feels. When Nawabi speaks about a sad moment, the colors and music adjust to that to show the reader what is felt. Since he adjusts colors and music, he is also able to change artistic styles to demonstrate hypothetical situations, Nawabi’s verbatim experience, and historical evidence to demonstrate what happened in Afghanistan at that exact time and how refugees were.

Photographs can be a physical or immaterial form of art that is widely accepted and utilized by all. Photographs help capture a moment and preserve the memory within them so that others who also view it, are able to see what the photographer saw through similar eyes. Every person has taken a photo, whether it’s of a building, a piece of food, or another artwork from their phone or digital camera. In Susan Sontag’s essay, “On Photography”, she discusses how photographs have been essential throughout history and people’s everyday life because of how they certify that the moment taken was real and that the experience was lived. Photography, according to her, furnishes evidence and reveals the moment and what was happening. 

Photographs mirror what has been seen by the photographer and captures experiences as it was viewed. Sontag describes photography as the remains of a memory that allows people to take “…possession of a past that is unreal…”(6). She provides an example of how a one full-page ad showed a small group of people and they’re all pressed together being excited. We don’t know exactly what they were happy about, but through the emotions and facial expressions taken by the photo, we know how they were feeling and we end up feeling it too. Photos reveal emotions and portray them even though we never experienced the exact memory. However, Elena Martinique in her article “When Staged Photography Becomes Art”, believes the opposite. She illustrates how photos conceal because there are staged photographs now that have been manipulated for artistic purposes. People could be posing for a photo acting joyful but the second the camera goes down, they can think differently since they had a “director” to tell them how to create the emotions and events. 

In my opinion, photographs are able to reveal, but they are limited. We will never know the thought process behind the photographer and how they were feeling but we are able to be empathetic with the photo illustration based on how it is expressed. If it was a photo of a scenery, like poachers hunting a lion, emotions are revealed. I am made to feel sorry for the lion through a single photograph that was taken and I’m also able to interpret the scene and what is going on, as it could be self-explanatory. Even if it had the potential to be staged, it still delivered the message of feeling pitiful. Furthermore, if it was a photo of a tree, what I see is revealed to me. The only thing concealed is why a photographer would want to take a picture. It could’ve reminded them of a different tree and that’s why they took a photo or maybe they just wanted to share with viewers what they thought was cool. The photographer’s thought process behind the photo is concealed, but the exact photograph is able to reveal emotions and imagery exactly how it has been taken.

In the section, “Tangible and intangible cultural heritage”, it is mentioned that immaterial elements are also prevalent in defining cultural heritage like dance, chanting, singing, diets, and music. As a Lithuanian-American, my family has made it important to make sure I learned and participated in Lithuanian culture. My mom had me sign up for Lithuanian folk dance festivals, like Šokių Šventė in Philadelphia, which displays the Lithuanian community’s traditional dancing and authentic clothing, called Dzukija, from the 19th century. Dzukija is one part of the four regions in Lithuania where my family resides and it is the costume my family wears when dancing. This province is in the south, poor part of Lithuania, and their specific style was to wear aprons with smaller checker and stripe patterns, and skirts with bright reds, greens, violets, and blues. This festival specializes in creating a growing, progressive, community that protects European national heritage by making sure individuals of this culture, such as me, wear the fabric that honors Lithuania and spread the art of folk dance, called Polka, and music, called Dainos. My mom, grandparents, and their family all participated when they were in Lithuania during Soviet Union control because it is what separated Lithuanian culture from Communist party rule. Many organizations and schools were created in villages to teach kids Lithuanian music, art, writing, and language because it was something being taken away from them and banned by Russian troops. Since my family and others fought to restore Lithuanian independence from Russian control in 1990 and won, it was extremely important for future generations to remember what their families went through and preserve it so that they can have their own identity. This is an example of intangible heritage because it is not something that can be touched or an object displayed for thousands to see, but rather it is a performing art that needs individuals to learn it in order for others to see it and do the same. If people in the country lose their art then how would their culture be expressed? Intangible heritage deeply impacts people by making them experience participatory action rather than just reading history. This is how it would be passed down and preserved since you’re continuing the traditions that your own family has participated in as well. Lithuanian arts and music is something distinct from each country that should be protected and shouldn’t be lost since it helped my community and others to remember how diverse it is.