Antonio Canova was an artist during the Neoclassical period. This also being the time of the Enlightenment, Classical Greek art, with its emphasis on order over chaos, served as the perfect model for artists (hence, “Neo”classical”). In fact, Canova’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1804) was inspired by a famous Greek statue known as the Apollo Belvedere.

The way most academics tell it is that Canova was so skilled that he could turn cold stone into warm flesh. The statue is logical and has perfect proportions. The story is clear, and the references are obvious to those who knew (the pose, the cap, the sword thingy, etc.).

Canova is doing even more than that, though. Medusa’s power turns people to stone if they make eye contact with her. Canova included a number of symbols but left out the most important one, the shiny shield that let him see Medusa before killing her. Also, notice where Perseus is looking: straight at her!

Every version of this myth tells how people turn to stone, but this one was made in the Enlightenment. Logically, sculpture is the only art form that can actually show this happening. Yes, Canova could turn cold stone into warm flesh, but really, he did the exact opposite. He made an artwork (out of stone) that showed how a man can turn into stone for reals.

Akhenaten was a pharaoh who broke with Egyptian tradition through art, worship, and engineering. This can be seen in a single stone known as “Akhenaten Sacrificing a Duck.” The facial features and the strange way the fingers wrap around the bird were not done in the 2000-ish years that preceded him. Also, those little hands reaching down were those of the Sun God. The one true God, according to him (The priests did not agree). Finally, the block itself was new. Known as a talatat, it was modular and allowed him to build a new capital quickly.

However, Egypt is built on tradition. The Nile might flood or not flow at all if things don’t stay the same forever. Hence, big structures with giant blocks and statues made of extremely hard stone.

Akhenaten messed with that tradition. When he died, they undid everything. Hoping to erase him from history, they disassembled his city and used his talatats as rubble and building materials for later structures.

Ironically, by hiding his stones in these new constructions, the images were preserved. They thought they were erasing him, but they were actually protecting him from the elements.

Obviously, the lesson is to remove those embarrassing stickers from your One Direction phase before taking your Ikea dresser to the landfill. There’s no telling what archaeologists might think 1000 years from now!

Sean Scully builds walls of luminous wonder inspired by his trips to Mexico and Ireland. Instead of using bricks or stone, he uses paint.

His Walls of Light are built in layers. He starts with a toned grid first (maybe different shades of orange), then thick, uneven brushstrokes of different colors are dragged over each rectangle. This is repeated again and again, and each pass lets a bit of the last layer through, making them truly vibrant.

He also assembles the grid so that elements never quite line up perfectly. Some are squeezed, some overgrown, and some are barely touching their neighbors.

But when I look at one, I don’t just see a grid, I see a mirror. Instead of showing me what I look like, though, it’s showing me how my identity has evolved.

One rectangle represents my love of hip-hop, which started in the 5th grade as I recited Rapper’s Delight to my bus mates. Now I listen to podcasts breaking down Kendrick albums. Squeezed in next to it is a rectangle about how I used to pile every animal I could onto a dinner plate. Now I’m a vegetarian who still loves Impossible Whoppers. You can still see the old layer in there somewhere.

What’s your Wall of Light made of?

In Japan, from the late 1600s to the 1800s, the merchants were becoming wealthy, and it was upsetting the Shogunate. The merchants were openly flaunting their wealth. The ruling class decided to do something about this. They passed the “No Fancy Kimonos For You, Lowly Merchant” laws.

These laws, however, didn’t address the little ensemble that hung from the obi belt where they kept their stuff. The ensemble had three parts: sagemono - the container to carry things in, netsuke - the catch at the top of the belt to keep the sagemono from falling off, and ojime - the little bead that was used to tighten or loosen the cord for the sagemono’s compartments.

Every man needed this ensemble because kimonos did not have pockets. Therefore, the ruling class couldn’t outlaw it. As an act of nonviolent resistance (kind of), the merchants had craftsmen design intricate and delicate versions of each part of the ensemble. An example might be a playful monkey for the netsuke, a tiny skull for the ojime, and gold inlay images on the sagemono. Men would wear multiple ensembles to carry different items and to reflect their personality through ornament.

Eventually, the Japanese adopted Western dress styles, and pockets killed the whole industry. That is, until people started hanging Hello Kitty from their cell phones!

I live in a place where everyone loves camping and hiking. I hate it. I am a big city, hotel with 600 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, room service kind of guy. But that doesn’t mean I hate nature, I would just rather experience it in a different way, is all.

That’s where Andy Goldsworthy comes in. He makes art out of nature. Sometimes the art is ephemeral, and sometimes it’s built to last. Whatever the case, he learns about the natural material and thus teaches us through his process.

Leafhorn (1994) is a prime example. He finds fresh leaves that are long and thin with strong, pliable spines. His tree of choice is chestnut. He also uses thorns from a hawthorn shrub.

He sits down and lets the materials dictate the shape. Fold a leaf so its sides touch and the spine becomes the edge. Wrap it around itself. Use a thorn to attach the next leaf. Fold, wrap, repeat, widening as he goes.

Eventually, a spiral of leaves emerges from this process and, as they dry, the spiral tightens. Squeeze it hard enough, though, and it turns to dust.

I’ve heard that there’s an Andy Goldsworthy artwork at a fancy hotel in Provence. I better book my flight before it crumbles back into nature!

I used to work as a waiter at a prime rib joint. I would often find myself “in the weeds” and mess up somebody’s order. The customer would complain and I would have to ask my manager to intercede.

If you were that customer you probably wouldn’t see me in the back of the house, standing at a terminal, explaining the mistake, and the manager swiping a keycard to delete the meal from the bill.

Da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks” (1483) is, in the eyes of Catholics, kind of similar. The group of people that commissioned it saw Mary as a “Mediator.” Not the person that could answer your prayers, but the person who had the ability to power-up your prayers. She straddled both worlds, human and divine.

The triangular composition tells you everything: Mary, stable in the center, holds her hand over her son (and her God!), Jesus. The angel, looking at you, points to John with one hand and holds Jesus with the other. John prays to Jesus under Mary’s embrace, then Jesus blesses John.

John, the customer, needs Mary, the server, to intercede with Jesus, the manager. The angel? That’s the host that greets you at the door and brings you to the back of the house to witness how, you too might get your meal comped one day.

You are in a museum and you come upon a pile of candy in shiny colorful wrappers in a corner. You are invited to take one.

Don’t be shy, go on.

Should you eat it, too? Yeah, you should. And do it while considering why it is called “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.).”

Felix Gonzalez-Torres left rules for the museum to follow. Upon first displaying, make sure the pile weighs 175 pounds and replenish it as you see fit (daily, weekly, etc.).

Ross was Felix’s partner and slowly died of A.I.D.S. The diminishing of the pile is meant to represent the wasting away of Ross. The replenishing is practice for dealing with loss. For both Felix and you.

Candy is perfect for this: The shiny wrappers, the invitation to take a piece, the taste is sweet and reminds you of being a kid. Also, you have something to do at the museum that rarely ever happens. “I get to touch it and take it with me?” you think.

You unwittingly become the disease that is slowly killing Ross.

As the candy slowly dissolves you remember that the museum will refill the pile so you can come back and do it again.

The way a horse is posed in an equestrian statue tells you how the rider died, right? Four hooves on the ground: died of natural causes. One off the ground: wounded in battle but died later. Two off: died in battle.

Negative ghost rider, that pattern is false.

The first equestrian statue with a horse rearing back, Philip IV by Pietro Tacca (1640), is an amazing story, though.

First, the statue is based on a painting by Diego Velázquez. He painted Philip IV on a horse rearing back while remaining he remained chill.

But Phil wanted this pose in 3D to outdo his dad’s statue. The problem: nobody had figured out how to make a heavy bronze sculpture where the front of the horse was unsupported.

Enter Galileo. Yes, the first guy to lift his telescope upward to observe space. He also dropped stuff off the leaning tower of Pisa to test gravity. Look out!

Using his new scientific method, Galileo determined that the center of gravity needed to be in the back of the horse. Tacca then used the tail to support the horse and made the back solid bronze, while the front was hollow.

Maybe the horse doesn’t tell us how Philip died, but it does show one thing clearly: Science can be art’s wingman anytime!

Marcel Duchamp was an avid chess player. There was one opponent that he couldn’t defeat, though.

His first readymade, “Bicycle Wheel,” was a stool with a tire-less wheel attached to the seat. There are multiple versions, but the stool is the height of “plop down.” The fork is sometimes straight and sometimes curved. The curved version has an unresolved symmetry thing happening that makes it dynamic. Both versions give off hourglass or candle vibes.

The story Duchamp tells is that he built it as a meditative gizmo. He would sit by the fire and spin the wheel and just think. Maybe he was remembering playing stick and hoop when he was a kid. When you see it, you will want to spin it too. Museums won’t let you though, so don’t!

He said his goal with his readymades was to make them as boring as possible so that you would focus on the concept. A urinal on its side titled ‘Fountain’ and submitted to an open art competition is the best example.

But, his first one is aesthetically pleasing. Seductive even.

No matter how many simple readymades that came after, from bottle racks to snow shovels, his first one didn’t conform to his retinal neutrality agenda.

“Checkmate, Marcel” - Bicycle Wheel

Everyone knows Monet is a painter of light. But that’s like saying hot dogs are just made of meat. There’s way more to it and we all know it. Oscar Meyer’s got nothing on Monet!

So let’s get into the lips, snouts, and hooves of the Rouen Cathedral series from 1892-1894.

Lips: The paintings are a study in how light hits the cathedral at different times of the day, in different seasons, and at different angles. He made close to 30. Some are colorful while others are monochromatic.

Snouts: Gothic Cathedrals are famous for their light. Flying buttresses allowed the buildings to be taller and the walls to be thinner. Therefore, the inside could be bathed in the “Divine Light” of colorful windows.

Hooves: Monet built layers of paint on top of each other. Up close, they are chunky messes that create shadows from how thick the paint is. You can’t have shadows without light!

Let’s slap this in a bun and squirt some mustard on it!

That’s three versions of light from the cosmic to the intimate: Exterior light moving across stone over time, the interior light that one imagines on the other side of that facade, and the physical paint catching real museum light.

Remember that time I compared Monet paintings to hot dogs? That was awesome.

“I don’t think any amount of explanation can bump the room of dirt into art for me.” - a text from my best friend after I told him about my recent visit to the Earth Room by Walter De Maria.

LFG, Travis!

Remember that painting called the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog? A man stands at the edge of a mountain staring into something vast and indifferent that will outlast him. That’s known as the sublime. Keep that in mind.

For almost 50 years, 280,000 lbs of dirt (22 inches deep) has sat in an upper floor apartment of a SoHo building in NYC. Not sitting really, it actually invades the side rooms, surrounds the structural columns, and fills every square foot. It’s maintained once weekly by a woman with a rake. She keeps anything from actually growing in it. She also buzzes you in.

Separating the dirt from the observer is a glass wall in a small observational space.

I may not have climbed a mountain but I walked up those narrow, steep stairs and stood in that small space looking over 3,600 square feet of living earth and contemplated my own insignificance.

I became the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

I eagerly await your next text, Travis!

Magritte once said, “when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, ’What does that mean?’ It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing.”

Challenge accepted, monsieur!

Just before he died, he made some self-portraits and a “Last Supper” painting. The Self-portrait with the apple in front of his face is his most famous painting. He also made one with a dove in front of his face. They were meant to show that we can never truly “see” one another. That’s the standard description anyway.

The apple, though, is from the first big story in Christianity - Adam and Eve. The dove from his other self-portrait, well that’s the Holy Spirit.

His “Last Supper” painting is often titled The Endearing Truth, but it’s better translated as The Agreeable Truth (L’aimable vérité). It is a version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s table with Jesus and his disciples absent. The “Truth” we have all agreed on is that Christianity no longer connects to anything real.

He could have used any objects to obscure his face. He chose hollow Christian symbols. If the symbols are hollow, then so is the distance between us.

There is nothing between us.

Well played, monsieur.

The Library that Michelangelo designed for Pope Clement VII was meant to have three rooms: a vestibule, a reading room, and a triangular rare books room.

There’s no rare books room.

That’s a bummer because that room would have achieved his grand plan: a spiritual journey from Hell to Heaven. Without it, visitors are trapped in Purgatory.

Here’s how it works. You walk into this tall, oppressive room. There are windows that aren’t windows and architectural details that butt into one another in strange ways. Then there is this stairway that feels like it is being barfed out of the room above. Michelangelo wanted the stairway in walnut. The guy who actually built it used stone.

The stairway takes you to the long reading room. It has windows on both sides. The ceiling and desks are made of the same intended material as the stairway. Books were chained to desks so you didn’t need wall space for them. Hence, windows.

But if Michelangelo had his way, the reading room would have led to a triangular room with a skylight overhead, reserved for the rarest books. And 3, well that’s a magic number.

Hell. Purgatory. Heaven. Michelangelo wanted to tell us a story about an epic journey in a building housing the rarest stories of them all.

While in Paris, Thomas Jefferson fell in love with the dome at the Hôtel de Salm. Of course he did. A high ceiling just gives you some space above, but a dome curves back toward you, turning infinite space into something you can live inside.

He went back to Virginia and built Monticello. You would think its dome would give you that same vibe. It doesn’t. Jefferson sealed off the dome from the room below. So when you walk into the parlor, imagining that you will be cradled in the space of a heavenly dome, it’s hidden by a flat ceiling, and the promise is not kept.

Unfulfilled promises were Jefferson’s pattern. He called slavery a corrupting moral catastrophe and drafted laws to eventually end it. Yet he had over 600 slaves over his lifetime. In public, he spoke admiringly of Native Americans, saying they were Europe’s intellectual equals, and then made a secret plan to bankrupt them to force them to sell their land.

The best thing the tour guides can say about the dome room is that it is “the prettiest storage room in America.” You might experience that same disappointment if you read his biography, too.

Tara Donovan did not invent the cube, that was some ancient Greek dude arguing about perfect forms or something. She also did not invent the modern toothpick, that was some shady American businessman in the late 1800s.

What Donovan did was discover that if you gathered a bunch of stabby, splintery toothpicks and pressed them into a cube form, gravity and friction would hold them together. She didn’t use glue, but I bet there was some blood spilled in all of that pressing.

Tara Donovan elevated something that sat in restaurants and pantries for decades and brought out its full potential. She alone had the insight to realize that one toothpick was boring but thousands, entangling naturally into a 4 ½ foot cube, was monumental.

That’s Donovan’s thing. She keeps asking the question, “When does a regular object become something more?” She takes advantage of what everyday things do naturally and then reorganizes them into art. Styrofoam cups want to nest and cluster into clouds, straws want to gather to form beehives, and toothpicks want to pack and bristle to become monumental cubes.

I wonder what a million light bulbs would form. Probably a bright idea!

Have you ever seen somebody walking with their head hanging low, kicking rocks? Or maybe someone oblivious to the world, staring up at the clouds? A simple tilt of your head can say so much.

Mark Rothko, like most of us, knew this.

On giant canvases, he would paint two or more stacked rectangles that seemed to vibrate with energy while remaining still and simple. One rectangle usually stood out more than the others.

But you would only feel that interaction if you got close to them. Like, “art guard yelling at you” close.

Incidentally, that’s where Rothko wanted you. Eighteen inches away, so you are fully enveloped by the painting. These are not landscapes to be viewed from afar. When you’re that close, your eyes are drawn up or down to the dominating rectangle, and your head follows. His earlier paintings had bright pinks and oranges, usually dominating the top half. Closer to the end of his life (his suicide, specifically), grays dominated the bottom half.

If you find yourself in front of a Rothko, get all up in there and feel it for yourself. And maybe ask that art guard to join you, too.

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Can you find the 18th-century French equivalent of a playboy CEO in this painting. He’s lying in the bushes staring up a young woman’s skirt. Perv.

He was also the head tax collector for the Catholic Church. All the rent money that came in from their land went through him first. Not before he took his cut, though. With that money, he set up private pleasure houses. Think of them as islands of pleasure, perhaps.

He also used it to commission a painting of himself receiving the fruits of his “labor” from his unknowing employer. Fragonard took the job but wisely refused to put a priest in the spot of a cuckold pushing the young woman on a swing. Afterall, he didn’t want this to be his last painting.

The Baron hung this painting in his private salon. Since Fragonard replaced the priest with a frail older nobleman, everyone could delight in its wit. “Look at me, making a fool of the church that pays me to collect taxes through a brutal, dishonest system exploiting the lower classes while cupid tells everyone to keep quiet about it,” he would say while probably checking out his best friend’s wife.

The Baron died of syphilis-related madness. Too many visits to the island, most likely.

When I was a kid, I would draw race tracks on paper. I would carefully design straightaways and hairpin turns. I put buildings and tunnels in there and probably a dragon, too. Then I would use a red crayon to “drive” the track as fast as I could without going outside of the lines. I was a dork.

In 1976, when I was drawing those tracks, Frank Stella painted an art car for BMW. This commission made him fall in love with racing.

He made a series of three dimensional paintings with names of the most famous raceways in the world. If you stand in front of one, you will find yourself as car, driver, and track all at once.

Stella used the language and materials of racing to build them. He combined race car metal, race car paint, and built layers of shapes like flexicurves and fender flares all to represent that line between fast and fatal. And then he did something I recognized immediately.

He made those same crayon-looking scribbles showing he couldn’t get that final layer on fast enough. Dorks of the world unite!

There’s a recurring symbol in art called a Memento Mori. It’s often a skull, and it’s a reminder that we are all going to die. It’s meant to keep everyone humble. Remember that.

In this painting two fancy Ambassadors are standing in front of the latest tech for 1533. The top shelf has scientific instruments for globetrotting. The bottom shelf shows the Pope and Luther at war, which meant everyone else was too. They are only Ambassadoring because they are trying (and failing) to convince Henry VIII not to make his own church.

You would expect a Memento Mori in a painting like this and you would be right. The skull is that weird gray diagonal thing at the bottom.

He painted it so that you couldn’t see it if you were focused on the earthly stuff. You can see it if you stand to the right side of the painting and look down at it. Holbein lets us know that it is difficult to think about dying while you’re busy showing off and vice versa. More importantly, he knew how ridiculous we would look trying to figure out that skull. Being wise requires a bit of foolishness, it seems.

In 1832 Horatio Greenough, America’s first skilled sculptor, looked at a Frenchman’s famous statue of George Washington and thought, “Meh.” The Frenchman depicted Washington as Cincinnatus but in 18th century gear. Cincinatus was a Roman general who assumed the role of dictator, defeated the enemy, and promptly resigned back to his farm and his many slaves. Washington did the same as Commander of the Continental Army and first President.

For Greenough, this wasn’t enough. In his eyes, Washington was a god. Specifically Jupiter, king of the Roman gods. He depicted Washington as a shirtless muscular being in a toga and sandals, sitting on a throne, offering his sword in a gesture of peace after the fighting and Presidenting was done. But any fifth grader obsessed with mythology knows that was not Jupiter’s style. He was petty, vindictive, and would have never willingly given up his power.

As soon as the statue was unveiled, people were simultaneously creeped out, amused, and offended. It is still visible at a Smithsonian in DC. It’s the one pointing to the costume from Hamilton on the 3rd floor that he desperately wants to put on.