If you can even call this one.

I am no poet.

So here’s what I would tell you

if this were a real love poem

and I were a real poet:

I love the dip between your nose and your lips,

The slight drop and the raise

The softness and the warmth

(Have I told you how I want to press my thumb there?)

My favorite part to draw

When my teacher had us practicing

My biology teacher had told me once that it was the symbol of perfection

the clear line where our mother met our father

I love the arc of your brows

The arc that my hand follows

granite tip dragged across until

I find

you eyes

your nose

your lips

your breath

darkening at a kiss

And have I told you of your cheekbones?

The sharpness of precise cuts in marble

With the warmth of a blush

And oh so soft to the touch

The subtleness of the shadow,

reworked again and again

layering shade over shade

the starting again with a brush

If in it were clay rather than charcoal,

I could hold your smile in my hands

I would brush my thumb against your ear

And marvel at how delicate bone, skin, and blood could be

I would brush the tip of my finger over your lips

And watch it curl into a smile

I would hold your hand

And admire the grooves of your knuckles

Pressing kisses in the spaces

I would run my fingers through your hair-

(I know this is so boring, but I would do it again and again)

If I were a better poet-

I would write of a burning passion

I would write about seeing you with my eyes closed

And of immortality

Love, life, and death

Or any of those big concepts

Poets love

I would write of how it truly is

to have an artist

loving you

For now

For my first love poem

That will be all.

Note: This poem is written for anybody in particular; at least not yet.

Beyond that; a small inconvenience I am willing to sidestep, they completely messed up their personalities and dynamics. (At least Kafka Asagiri manages to pay a little bit of homage to the literary greats…which says a lot)

In lieu of that, I have decided that it should be my undertaking to give you historically accurate information about the “Heroes in a half-shell”.

Cast of Characters

There will come a day and age when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are no longer relevant.

Today is not that day.

There will be days when people talk about the “Italian Renaissance Ninja Painters”

Today is that day.

To quickly get everything into order, the Renaissance is divided up into three; the Early Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Late Renaissance.

The Early Renaissance is where you see Western art starting to move away from Medieval styles such as the Byzantine and Gothic. Donatello is from this era and is most famous for bringing back sculpting in the Renaissance.

The High Renaissance is when you’ll get the rest of the cast. Donatello dies when Da Vinci is still a teenager, around fourteen years old. Da Vinci doesn’t start his artistic career until he’s in his 20’s. (We’ll get into that later) Michelangelo is born nine years after Donatello’s death and Raphael is born eight years after Michelangelo.

The High Renaissance trio were intense rivals, often referred to as the “class of Titans”. However, Da Vinci is an old man by then and dies a year before Raphael, who dies as a young man. Michelangelo lives the longest of all of them, surviving the Renaissance and into the Baroque, although he is too old by then to produce work that is very significant.

Donatello

Donnie is the second oldest in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and is the most tech savvy of the bunch as well as being the voice of reason for his brothers. He is keenly intelligent and is easily labeled as the “brains” of the group. (He was my mom’s favorite of the turtles, mostly since he was purple)

Donatello the artist on the other is famous for being difficult to work with. (You’ll notice this trend with the other brothers) He was an artistic genius, of course, and is most notable for bringing back the art of sculpting in the Renaissance by studying the ruins of Classical sculptures.

Besides that, Donatello was a very passionate individual. Not in a cute high-schooler-writing-a-blog-about-their-niche-habit kind of passionate. He would literally be seen in his studio screaming at these chunks of rock. Sometimes, when he deemed a client ignorant, he would simply smash his creation. Donatello was not much better in public and was a rude and unapproachable figure. However, he was fiercely defended by Cosimo de Medici, his patron from the Medici family, who accepted Donatello’s eccentricities which he considered a byproduct of the artist’s talent. (If you are interested in reading more about them, check out my other article on the Medicis!)

However, in terms of his relationship to his other brothers- Donatello was long dead by the time their beef started. However, his work as a sculptor would greatly influence Michelangelo. The dramatic “Clash of the Titans” was between the other three.

Leonardo Da Vinci

Let me introduce you to my childhood crush; Leo. As the leader of his brothers, he’s calm, aloof, responsible, and all in all your picture perfect leader. The calm, cool, collected kind of men I tend to go for- in my daydreams of course. (I quite literally have a type)

However, Da Vinci is notorious for…lacking in that department. He was a HUGE procrastinator- he worked on the Mona Lisa, widely regarded as his masterpiece, for 16 years. Even when it was finished, he didn’t return it to the person who had originally commissioned it. Instead, he took it to France with him during his last years of life and gifted the Mona Lisa to the king.

That was the thing with Da Vinci, everybody wanted him to paint for them but few projects would capture his attention and he finished even fewer. At the time of his death, he only has about twenty paintings.

However, Da Vinci didn’t consider himself as just an artist. His actual resume (one of the first recorded resumes in the world in fact) lists him as a civil engineer and an armorer. His specialty was in defensive architecture. It is only at the bottom of the page that he briefly mentions his abilities as an artist, almost as an afterthought.

He was a freak genius, equal parts freak and genius. It’s a pretty well-established fact that the dude would go digging around graveyards to get better at anatomy. His notebooks were written so that they could only be read in the mirror and the sketches for his inventions (usually war machines) were way ahead of their time.

Of the three Titans, Da Vinci was the oldest of them and had already established himself in society. His greatest rival was the far younger new prodigy of the Medici family, Michelangelo. Michelangelo was in his twenties while Da Vinci was in his late fifties.

The two were especially competitive due to working side by side on the same commission to paint a battle scene on the Council Hall in Palazzo Vecchio, which naturally created a little bit of negative feelings towards each other. The unveiling of the hall would be a great act of patriotism for the city and thus placed a lot of pressure on the artists’s backs. They publicly criticized each other, Da Vinci being especially snide towards Michelangelo’s extremely muscular figures.

However, neither of the two ever got around to finishing the painting as Michelangelo was called away to Rome by Pope Julius II and Da Vinci just did what he did best- leaving another painting unfinished.

Da Vinci would go on to paint the Mona Lisa, which he considered as his life’s masterpiece. He would leave Italy and settle comfortably in the French royal court where he died a few years later.

Michelangelo

What’s not to love about the youngest of the bunch? Mikey is the care-free, fun-loving, dude of the pack. My baby brother’s greatest aspiration and the reason why he begged our mom for pizza constantly. He’s just chill.

The same cannot be said about Michelangelo.

He was an artistic genius, creating masterpieces since he was in his twenties which I thought was a really big kid number but now that I am slowly approaching said number, suddenly you realize just how good he was.

He is most famous for his work on the Sistine Chapel for Pope Julius II and was notoriously salty about it.

Michelangelo HATED painting, his true passion was sculpting. During his commission, he had reportedly written poetry about how much he hated working on the painting. Michelangelo had gone as far as running away from Rome which didn’t really pan out when you have the Pope coming after you.

For Michelangelo, sculpting was his love but painting was his way of paying the bills.

However, his disdain for painting is as strong as his passion for rocks. Michelangelo would personally go to the marble quarries and handpick the pieces he wanted to work on.

He had a very specific reason for doing this. Many times, Michelangelo would claim to be able to see angels trapped inside the marble. He would then work to set them free- which is pretty poetic if you ask me.

If it sounds like Michelangelo is getting an unproportional amount of clout, it’s because he is. Giorgio Vasari, our lovely (and very biased) blogger of the Renaissance favored Michelangelo.

Michelangelo was easily one of the greatest-if not the greatest, artist of his day.

However, his beef with his contemporary Raphael is legendary- which I will get into once I introduce the latter.

Raphael

Raph is the most hot-headed and aggressive of his brothers, often butting heads with Leo as he tends to prefer working alone. When my darling baby brother was going through his emo era (which lasted for the entirety of his Kindergarten year- thank goodness he got that out of the way early, our parents can only handle one emotionally constipated child), he often referenced Raph’s lines.

Ironically, out of the four artists, Raphael may have been the most reasonable of all of them. He was very much a people-person and had many friends, which was very rare for an artist due to the cutthroat competition.

As a young artist, he looked up to Michelangelo and Da Vinci, implementing much of their techniques into his work. He is most notable for his aptitude for colors and his ability to create balance in a work. Even Vasari compliments his skill, acknowledging his ability to utilize the knowledge from his predecessors. However, he quickly follows up with the fact that Michelangelo relied entirely on his own knowledge of anatomy to create work that rivaled the Greeks and Romans.

It wasn’t until his arrival in Rome that pitted the two great Titans of their day against each other. (Da Vinci was old news at this point)

Their rivalry was legendary, especially since they had the same sponsors. Suddenly, Michelangelo’s greatness was challenged by this newcomer.

Oh the horror.

He was commissioned by Pope Julius II to paint his private library; each wall meant to symbolize a different school of thought. There would be Law, Religion, Poetry, and most famously- Philosophy which we now know as the School of Athens.

The hilarious part is the fact that he was literally working just a room away from Michelangelo who was confined to finishing the Sistine Chapel- very much against his will.

The School of Athens displays many of the most influential historical figures such as Plato and Socrates. However, Raphael being the lovable dude he is, he snuck many familiar faces into the paintings such as Da Vinci. The background of the School of Athens was largely inspired by an architect friend of his and the project he had been working on. He even managed to hide a self-portrait of himself into the very corner.

Say what you may want, but I assure you that if I could paint at a level anywhere near Raphael, I would do plenty of self-insert fanart of me and the gang.

During this entire time, Michelangelo was very paranoid of the idea of someone discovering the Sistine Chapel before it was finished.

One night, when Michelangelo had already left, Raphael snuck into the unguarded Sistine Chapel. Inspired by a freshly painted angel, Raphael immediately rushes back to his work.

The next morning, he excitedly shows Michelangelo his new work. I picture him literally bouncing on his toes and waving his hands dramatically at the wall (he’s Italian), barely containing a smile.

And cut to Michelangelo who is literally about to murder someone.

If you look very carefully at the School of Athens, you will notice a particularly noticeable man hugging a big block of rock.

That man happens to be a depiction of Michelangelo and the portrayal of him can be read in several ways. By some cases, it is almost flattery with Raphael crowning Michelangelo as the master of marble.

And by others, Raphael is quite literally making Michelangelo a butt of a joke. Sure he’s crowned as the greatest sculptor of their time- one could argue that he was the greatest of all time, but Raphael purposefully places him away from the others. He highlights Michelangelo as the lone loser of the group whom nobody particularly likes.

However, Raphael dies young. Of the four greats, Michelangelo has the longest life- living past the Renaissance and even producing works in the Baroque style.

At the end of the day, both turtles and men have made a lasting impact in visual culture to this day. Both have clearly held an important place in my childhood.

My only argument is just a quick reordering of the names. Donnie should have been Leonardo and Leo should have been Donatello. Michelangelo should have been Ralph whereas Michie reminds me of Raphael. It makes sense chronologically as well.

If you glazed over that last paragraph, I don’t blame you.

In summary, there was beef.

Anywhoozies-

Have a nice life~

Luv ya <3

To say I was disappointed is putting it lightly.

However, written in bold red pen and highlighted three times in eye-curdling yellow to stand out against the mess of pencil scrawls, I wrote:

MEDICI FAMILY: MARRY THEM

It does not take a Sigmund Freud to decipher what I meant. The doodles of dollar signs around the words only further cemented my meaning.

As you can see, even from a tender age, I always had bold aspirations.

For those of us who are less skilled in reading social cues, thirteen year old Bonnie Yang had every intention of marrying the very family that financed the entirety of the Renaissance; the ones who rekindled the flame of the arts in the silent ashes of the Middle Ages. (I’m so poetic- I call dibs on writing the wedding vows)

So in honor of my future husband/wife (I’m not entirely too picky on that matter) I have decided to do a drawn out analysis on their family line.

The Medici family are easily one of the most notable family names in history and are practically godly in terms of art history. The greatest names in art history are almost always associated with the Medici family; three of the four original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all worked for them. (Raphael was an interesting little dude, but all artists tend to be a bit loony)

Historians have even gone as far as referring to them as the Medici dynasty, at the height of their power they controlled banks all across Europe. One of them even found herself on the French throne.

Their name is practically guaranteed in every art history book, due to the fact that they literally financed the rebirth of Western art.

However, their name was not worth much in the beginning.

At first, the Medici family was nothing more than just a wool business with a small banking business on the side. In the city of Florence, just barely waking up from the Dark Ages and still dealing with the effects of the plague, the people at the top of the social ladders were powerful families. Those families ran the political stage of Florence.

Florence is known as the birthplace of the Renaissance. During the 14th century, Florence was the place to be. Similar to how Paris was in the 19th century and New York in the 20th century. All the new ideas, the fashion trends, the very seat of culture was in Florence.

However, it’s not exactly a romantic place to your significant other for a honeymoon. The plague was still rampant and the sewage system was mediocre at best. There weren’t laws written in stone and sometimes the best way to settle a difference was with a duel. Romeo and Juliet on steroids.

In the middle of it all, Giovanni de’Medici somehow managed to bring his family up in ranks.

Their first move for power began when Giovanni sponsored a pirate for a pope. (The Church isn’t as gracious as it is today and it was all too easy to buy your way into power.) The pirate, Cossa, became Pope John XXIII. Immediately, he brings the Medici family to power and they become known as the Bankers of God.

With the death of Giovanni de’Medici on February 20, 1429, his son, Cosimo de’Medici took over as the head of the family. To say that he was under a lot of pressure is an understatement. Rival families were eyeing him, waiting for just the tiniest of slip-ups that deemed him inferior to the prestige his father had worked so hard for. His own family were wary of him, wary of their future.

Cosimo decides to prove to everyone that he was that dude by fixing the greatest problem in their world; finishing the dome of the Florence Cathedral.

A little bit of background if I may, the original builders of the Florence Cathedral had an unequal logic to ego ratio which left the largest building of Florence (and arguably one of the largest churches in Europe) dome-less.

Can you imagine it? This building that was meant to be the pride of Florentines has become its very shame. Everyday as you walk your mule, shop in the markets, visit some dude or another, or just happen to take a stroll in the plague-ridden city, you are staring at this eyesore.

The Florence Cathedral quite literally cast a shadow over Florence.

Originally, the Florence Cathedral was planned to have the largest dome in the entire world of its time. (It still is a record holder as the largest masonry dome ever built)

However, all knowledge of dome-building was lost with the fall of Rome. Even the recipe for creating the cement was gone.

Enter Filippo Brunelleschi.

A genius by all means and he definitely had all of the pros and cons of being a genius. He was infamous for his temper (as seems to be the norm of Renaissance geniuses) and was more of a street urchin than a genius.

All in all, not exactly the type of people you would expect the head of the Medici house to be associating with.

However, this was the family who placed a bet on a pirate for becoming pope so this probably isn’t all too out of the realm.

Brunelleschi, still bitter from losing the door decorating contest with artist Lorenzo Ghiberti, prowled through Roman ruins (which Florence seems to have a plethora of) and sketched everything that he saw. He would apply all of his observations in the construction of the Dome.

The construction of the Dome certainly deserves a Hollywood training montage. For the sake of this article, I’m skipping over that. Beginning in 1420 and finally finishing in 1436 with the addition of a glamorous marble lantern in 1446.

However, in 1433, we’re going to pivot from this riveting training montage back to Cosimo.

Remember that Florence is not exactly a fairytale.

While the Medici family was living their rags to riches delulu, the Albizzi family were gnawing their fingernails straight down to their knuckles. In a perfect world, the two families could have lived in peace.

However, during the Renaissance, if a rival family was to gain more influence, that meant that your family was losing influence. Vice versa.

When the Albizzi family had finally had enough, they pulled a couple strings and Cosimo found himself imprisoned in the tallest tower of Florence where anyone could have murdered him and nobody would have bat an eye. The Albizzi family accused him of treason and held a public “democratic” election.

The result left the Medici family high tailing it out of Florence to avoid getting their heads chopped off.

Random fun-ish fact: The guillotine was invented during the Enlightenment era as it was a more “humane” way of killing someone. (I’m just going to leave that here)

In their absence, the city of Florence began to crumble economically as almost everybody depended on the Medici bank. Eventually, everything grinned to a halt. Nobody was really all that happy with the Albizzi family and begged for the return of the Medici family.

The Medicis returned absolutely triumphant. Fanfare, parade, confetti, your enemy crying in some dark corner, people who doubted you weeping their apologies, old friends congratulating you on your miracle; it’s everything you dream of in your ultimate revenge plan.

The first thing Cosimo did was slaughter the entire Albizzi bloodline.

Everything the family does after can be found in the art history books.

Anywhoozies.

That’s that.

Have a nice life~

To be completely honest, the only thought in my head right now is PV=nRT. Apologies in advance if I’m not as riveting as usual.

Now that we’ve got the sharp suit, uniform-cut politeness out of the way, I would like to introduce you to a new series of essays I’m going to summon out of straight air, where I am going to hyper-fixate over a painting for about an hour.

Sources? Divine intuition.

Bibliography? Gut feeling.

Just trust me, babes.

We’re not going chronologically, alphabetically, periodically- I’m just going with the paintings that I vibe with.

So welcome, and let’s get right into it-

(Also, this shouldn’t even need to be a topic of discussion, but I’ve had my fair share of accusations- there is not a drop of AI in here- 100% Asian Art Hoe certified bs. Only Grammarly is pissing me off with squiggly red lines)

Today’s topic of discussion is:

An Allegory with Venus and Cupid

By Bronzino

I assure you, when I first heard of this painting, we probably had the same thoughts.

When the author confessed that this was their favorite artwork, I had to do a lap around the library- purely out of fear of what other twisted fantasies I would embark upon in that ratty old book.

So, imagine what my brain cell cooked up when I realized that that’s literally a mother and son duo right there.

(Off topic-ish, but the book was actually pretty good. I would definitely buy it just for it to serve looks on my bookshelf and signal my pretentiousness to onlookers. But it’s called “The 12-Hour Art Expert” by Noah Charney. Not as boring as other books, I’ve forced myself through and actually fun)

Now, I would offer my sincerest congratulations to those whose brains could accept this fact and go on to appreciate the artist’s skillful rendition of the blue fabric standing in bold contrast to the subject’s milky pallor.

But for the rest of us with our minds in the gutter, don’t worry about it- I still have another five hundred words to lead you down the path of righteousness.

Bare Bones

(Give me a moment peeps- I’m locking in. But feel free to skip this part)

Name: An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (1545)

Artist: Agnolo Bronzino

Medium: Oil on Wood

Location: National Gallery, London

Description: The painting is bathed in a glaring white light and the painting is almost artificial with the artist’s brushstroke as smooth as the figures’ marble skin. The central female figure is locked in an embrace with a male youth in an almost erotic manner. In her left hand, she holds a golden apple while the other twists around the boy, who is implied to be her son, Cupid, with a golden arrow balancing in her right hand. Both figures are in the nude, and their limbs are exaggeratedly elongated, yet the effect is quite elegant. They look each other in the eye and share a kiss while Cupid attempts to steal Venus’s crown and reaches over to cup one of her breasts. A pair of masks rests by Venus’s foot. A smiling child parades a handful of roses to be thrown on the pair. They rest on a length of deep blue fabric that is held aloft by an older, muscular man in the background who reaches out towards another figure in the background who lacks the entire back of their head. Behind Cupid is a figure with sickly yellowed skin, rotting teeth, and thinning hair. There is another figure of a woman with twisted joints- her hands are swapped on opposite arms, and her knees are disjointed. The back of her body disappears into the tail of a serpent. A bright white artificial light illuminates the central figures and obscures those in the background, heightening the artificiality of the painting.

Historical Overview: The piece was commissioned by Cosimo I d’Medici of Florence as a gift to King Francis I of France

I’m not even lying when I tell you that I wrote that aloud in my head with a very British accent. We’re just going to shove that thinking cap really far back into the closet now. (who knows- might even find my future sugar mommy back there)

Confession time: Do you ever go to the museums and just see those people who just get completely lost in those paintings? They can sit there all day and just drool over a piece. (I fear that I should be more poetic about this- something like getting lost in the sea of colors and drowning in feelings or something. You get the gist of it)

Yeah-no.

I can’t do that.

I very vividly remember my lovely father taking me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when I was about eight years old. Somehow, he was convinced that weekly art lessons in an old lady’s house would make me an art connoisseur. He sat me down in front of a painting (which I now know was a Jackson Pollock) and asked me what it made me feel.

Feel?

I felt hungry.

The only thought in my mind was the vendor I saw selling a New York hot dog a couple blocks back.

My passion burned bright even at such a tender age.

And to be completely honest, whenever I go to museums, it feels more like a scavenger hunt- to see how many things I could find from my books. The most emotion I got was the relish as I crossed off another thing on my to-do list.

As much as I would love to drool over a painting, I’m not quite there yet.

So, I figured, let’s just treat each painting like a scavenger hunt-

Which makes an allegorical painting the perfect choice.

Now that we’ve had a cinematic pause, I’m just going to backtrack for a moment.

What is an allegory?

I think of it as just a bunch of niche fandom references shoved into a single image. And that fandom consists entirely of European history, Greek/Roman mythology, and the Bible.

So, let’s go squeal over the work of some fanboy who has been dead for several centuries.

While the focus of the painting is obviously the two figures in the front, I think we can definitely do ourselves a favor and talk about the NPCs in the background.

I hope we can all agree that those are the most…eye-catching NPCs that I have ever stumbled upon. (Does not even come close to Mister Hieronymus Bosch- I’ll take whatever he was having)

Here’s the painting for reference: (We’re going counterclockwise here, which is basically in the general direction of 🔄)

We’re starting in the right corner with the hunky grandpa painted with Michelangelo-worthy muscles-

With the hourglass over his shoulder, Bronzino labels him as Father Time.

Mr. Worldwide over here has quite literally been the symbol of time passing for a couple of different cultures, most likely stemming from the Greek Titan Chronos, whose symbol was the sickle used for harvesting. When we got to the Romans, he became Saturn, and his sickles turned into a scythe.

Once the Renaissance rolled around and they started creating their own headcanons (or fan theories- for all of my older readers out there), Father Time was paired with the Grim Reaper, who was the symbol of death.

We don’t see Father Time used as often now, at least not in comparison to the Grim Reaper, but he is almost always depicted with a beard (as seen above), a pair of wings (as seen above), and an hourglass (as seen above) or any other time-telling device.

He’s pulling a blue cloth (which has a metric buttload of artistic meaning, if you’re interested in being pretentious, check out my article on the history of blue here) over another figure.

The figure is most likely Oblivion, missing the entirety of the back of their head, which obviously means forgetfulness (twin!)

And then this gets juicy.

Why is Father Time covering Oblivion?

Bookmark this question for me, and we’ll get back to it in a jiffy.

Moving down just a tab bit more (right above Cupid’s juicy booty) we have this lovely fellow over here-

Yikes.

His skin is yellowing, his teeth are rotting, he’s ripping out his hair, he’s half-blind, and he’s practically cowering away from Cupid’s buck-naked booty in all of its marble grandeur.

He’s a special little guy with a special little story which makes this entire piece just that much spicier.

You see, this piece was commissioned by some rich Italian dude (Cosimo I d’Medici of Florence- a real mouthful) as a gift to the French king. Common courtesy dictates that when sending art to someone as a gift, you don’t usually add a dude who is a literal cough, limp, and sneeze away from death. But that just might be me.

This dude has been interpreted as Jealousy or Suffering; you get the gist of it.

The thing is, some people (with PhDs) have interpreted him as Syphilis. The victims of the sexually transmitted disease often experienced symptoms as portrayed by the dude.

Do me a favor and go back to that bookmark I asked you to save earlier, the whole thing with Father Time and Oblivion- what was he trying to do? (Feel free to take some time to ponder this on the toilet, I’ll be right here to baby-step with you once you’ve pondered enough)

Father Time is clearly trying to cover Oblivion and our friend Jealousy/Suffering/Syphilis.

Zooming out again and looking at the picture, he’s trying to stop Oblivion’s attempt to conceal Venus and Cupid.

I mean look at them-

Are they not literally screaming Wattpad-level spice?

Imagine how some Victorian-NO-ANKLES-NO-ANKLES-man would react to this painting.

If I was a dark romance author, I would not even dare put something like that on my cover. (I mean shirtless men, I’m okay with, but we’re going to have to pull out the good ol’ y=mx+b to find the slope of that line this crossed)

Erotic isn’t even the right word for this.

What is Bronzino’s message? Why is Venus kissing her son? Why is Time trying to cover Oblivion- to have this scene fade into history?

And why the heck did he have the balls to ship this off to the king of France?

Like my papa always says, a good piece of art should always leave you with more questions than answers.

And like my idol, Oscar Wilde said, “To explain a poem is to betray it.”

And like how I can (usually) put my ego aside and actually admit that I have no idea what was going through the mind of some balding white dude from several centuries ago.

So, let’s put a bow on this and finish off with the people we have left.

Fat little baby going to through flower petals, he can be ignored. The most head-scratching he requires is the thorns wrapped around his little ankle.

It’s the girl behind him that honestly really speaks volumes about this painting.

Bronzino was actually a pretty poetic dude. While I do enjoy being pretentious in the artistic sense, I don’t dabble much in the language arts (which, as you can probably tell from my eloquent words)

And like all poetics, he has a tendency to take the long way with words, filling sentences with similes and metaphors, throwing in a couple of mythical allusions in twists and turns, returning the ring to Mordor and defeating Sauron, spiraling and loop-de-loops, then finally the lovely period mark.

With all due respect (which often has varying quantities) in my very (un)professional opinion, I would pin this entire painting on the girl in the back.

She’s beautiful. In one hand she’s offering a honeycomb. Oh joy and happiness.

But if you squint a little more, you’ll realize that her hands are swapped and her lower body is that of a serpent. Connect your two brain cells and you realize that she gives you the heebie jeebies and Bronzino probably meant something by that.

Which brings me back to the question, how did he have the balls to send that to the king of France?

Anywhoozies, that’s my first big kid art analysis. Round of applause everybody.

I think I deserve a Kit Kat.

And that’s that.

Have a nice life <3

Subject: Concerns Regarding School Draft

Hello, I hope this email finds you well.

I am sorry to bother you while you are away; I’ve noticed that it has been awhile since you last came to class. The substitute teacher is great, so please don’t worry about that.

I was wondering if everything is okay because I remember that a few days before you left you suddenly announced to the class how students from the next period had thrown gum wrappers at you. You told us that you were unsure if you wanted to laugh or cry.

And I wanted to say–

Sorry.

I am sorry for the group chats.

The group chats with contact after contact of my classmates hiding behind the lists of numbers.

The same group chats where we post picture after picture of you with filter after filter slapped over your face until you’ve become

an Instagram-worthy meme.

I am sorry for the empty chairs in the classroom,

each a cavity

for a student who gave up in your class-

who gave up

because

of

you.

You still call their names during attendance to their silent seats

before musing how they have already missed

class after class.

Perhaps

it is the stomach bug going around,

you say.

But we both know why.

We all do.

I am sorry.

Because I notice.

I notice the way you always– always, have a smile on your face

Strained and taut

Fake, all of it false

But there.

Always– always, there

Strange that you would put on such a smile,

When all of us

Have our heads

Bent

Over a phone

So entranced,

Not even sparing a glance at our doorholder.

I notice.

I listen to the way your voice tr a i l s o f f

When you hear the silence responding to your lectures

When all of us have our heads bent over our phones

And the rest of us?

Well.

I am sorry if this is stepping out of line, but can we not agree that I am simply taking a step an entire class should have taken?

(A class of silent totems and bent over a phone)

When one of my classmates asks you a question, I see you brightening up with an answer before faltering and suggesting that they ask AI instead. I turn my papers in and receive generic responses disguised in mock empathy as false as the algorithm programs it to be. Once when I inquired about my grades, I saw an AI chatbox open to a lesson plan with important points marked in bold and underlined with bullets of summaries.

I remember you teaching the same lesson the very next day with the same bulleted thoughts.

I am sorry if this is stepping out of line.

The substitute seems a little distant and only answers when we prompt them, but I guess this could be because they’ve only been here for three years. They are willing to help us, although their answers are somewhat vague; and yet, we’re still willing to use them.

I hope you return to the classroom soon.

Some of us have noticed your absence.

Best,

Anonymous

A guilty habit that I have, which I will definitely be regretting in the future, is the fact that I listen to music when I’m studying.

Sounds stupid, I know.

I kid you not, I need to listen to my king Hozier when I’m doing logarithmic functions but the moment that that math test rolls around, and suddenly my whiskey isn’t really all that sweet.

I’m not going to excuse myself by saying that music helps me focus- it does not. I’d just rather be listening to Adele rather than “log base ten of x is equal to the square root of the Empire State building. Find the number of apples that Suzie’s aunt has up her nose”

Speaking of Adele, I love her. That’s it. End of discussion.

Quick story time with Bonbon: It was an ungodly hour, and I was doing ungodly things (linearizing first order reactions for AP Chemistry- I have a test tomorrow. Will Bonbon pass the class or pass away? Who knows? Stay tuned!)

Update: Class average was 23%

I will not be announcing my score besides the fact that it remained in the double digits.

As horrid as that test was, I can perfectly justify myself in this article.

You see, I had spent a good deal of that night listening to Adele’s "Rolling in the Deep”. Did not prepare me emotionally for that devastating test, but the music video poked my mind in the right places to summon a thought.

I’m going to assume that you’ve seen the music video, with 2.8 billion views (last checked 01/21/2026) the statistics skew in my favor. Taking place in an abandoned building, there’s a recurring shot throughout the video of a staircase that leads down to a pile of shattered ceramic plates. A figure outside of the shot throws plate after plate that contributes to the growing pile of broken utensils.

Sure, the entire message of her song, “Rolling in the Deep”, is centered around the raw feelings of heartbreak and breaking dishes can convey that sentiment quite nicely.

It just didn’t sit right with me; it was like fingernails on chalkboards. Horrendous. Devastating. A true tragedy.

I sound like my mom…

Another favorite phrase of my lovely mother has to be “Kids these days…”. It is an unescapable word that you are fated to utter to your predecessors at some point in life.

So, I’m just going to try it out-

Kids These Days

We are all consumerists. The very fact that you are still here, reading (consuming!) this article just proved my point.

Take it as you will, I’m just going to hop over to my next point-

Due to this consumerist mentality, we assign attributes to inanimate objects.

Wow.

That was quite a jump.

Let’s back it up for a moment.

Diamonds.

They are unbreakable, a symbol of true and everlasting love. If you want someone till death do you part, you’re going to have to put a ring on it- preferably one with a fat juicy diamond on top.

While it is true that diamonds have a unique atomic structure which makes it the hardest metal on the periodic table (look at me, finally using some of that AP Chem) it’s really not that rare.

It’s just been marketed to you that way.

It’s not a symbol of love; it’s just been made into it through decades of commercials and weddings.

Roses don’t mean love either.

So, let’s bring it back to Adele and her broken dishes.

When I see dishes, my first thought was food- dinner, a nice dinner with a salad fork and a butter knife. And I hate eating alone, so there’s probably someone with me. A family gathering or a romantic candle lit dinner.

Adele quite literally took all of these assumptions and shattered them. She took the idea of sharing a meal- of togetherness, and smashed them against the wall. The shards gather in a mountain, layering over each other as that broken regret piles higher and higher with each shattering instant.

(Wow that was really deep)

This excess of waste highlights her point and any less would not have achieved her desired results.

It is a tried-and-true visual metaphor. Those broken dishes were effective in expressing Adele’s raw and bitter heartbreak, but that just doesn’t justify waste.

There’s this common pattern that I’ve noticed with modern art. Artists are so relaxed about using a crap ton of material. I mean, take Jackson Pollock with his drip paintings- the place looks like a murder scene. Gustave Klimt literally painted with gold as his background.

Then you do a quick 180 and you look at the Renaissance artists when simply getting blue on your palette was a hassle. (If you’re interested, check out my article on the history of blue here)

This idea of excess seems to be necessary to express intensity, but…no.

While Adele keeps things on the tamer side, this other British dude completely disregards the border society drew.

Here’s the thing, broken dishes can be replaced. Those shards will be swept away, and Adele will go on with her life.

But this dude-

As eloquent as I can be, I cannot express my deeply profound hatred for this little [redacted]

Britishly

Do you know that one quote that goes like-

“The only difference between me and someone in a psych ward is that I’m outside.”

Well, I feel like that quote is perfectly applicable with Damien Hirst.

The only difference between him and the prime suspect of a murder mystery show is that we call him an artist. (probably his inflated bank account as well)

Damien Hirst has used and mutilated the corpses of more than nine hundred thousand animals.

His excuse?

He is simply offering commentary on mortality.

How noble.

One of Hirst’s most famous pieces, titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, was purchased by billionaire Steven A. Cohen in 2004 for eight million dollars although it is rumored to have sold for 12 million dollars.

The piece features a 12-feet long female tiger shark suspended in a glass case filled with blue formaldehyde.

When the specimen began to deteriorate in 2006, it was replaced by another female tiger shark, which raised questions about its authenticity.

Hirst defended his work, saying that-

“the idea is more important than the object”.

Wow. What a splendid quote. Truly insightful. Definitely took you a great deal of syllables to simply say, “Well damn. Someone fed my ego $12 million and what are you going to do about it?”

Each to their own I suppose.

Before you accuse me of being too stupid to possibly understand as novel an idea as sticking a corpse in a box, Hirst himself had said:

“It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.”

Is that not a quote straight from the mouth of a serial killer? A Gotham City villain?

The very fact that he had the audacity to say this as he was accepting the Turner prize, which is an award given annually to notable British visual artists. Not only does that speak mountains about his ego, he is very well aware that he is a twisted [redacted]

Contemporary art has its merits, but Damien Hirst has pushed it past its boundaries. Arranging the corpses of animals aesthetically is not exactly the definition of art, and no amount of syllables twisted into statements about death should be glorified in this manner.

It certainly should not be worth millions of dollars to observe something that would have otherwise belonged to a crime scene in a murder mystery show.

Damien himself had commented-

“I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. So far I’ve found there aren’t any. I just wanted to be stopped, and no one will stop me”

Destruction has become nothing more than a shock value in art; rather than making the viewer reflect on their work, it causes a reaction.

Which, yes, lingers in the viewer’s consciousness, but it stays at the surface level and rarely penetrates to a more profound level.

Art does not need waste to be validated, its very value has come from scarcity.

Note: This is my first opinions piece posted here, it might marinate into an argumentative piece somewhere along the line. However, there’s more opinions and feelings here than thoughts which I would definitely love to expand on and back up with facts. Thoughts?

I assure you; I would look glamorous in a little black dress with white gloves coming up to my elbows and fat pearls around my neck. Channeling my inner Cruella de Vil; a gorgeous widow who may or may not be the reason her loaded husband croaked.

If I can’t snatch a PhD or two, that doesn’t seem like a horrid back up plan.

Gatekeep Girlboss Gaslight

Ladies-

We all know the holy mental trinity (please refer above)

And we all know the holy fashion trinity: Neck full of pearls, elbow length gloves (white or black is up for debate)-

And the little black dress.

If you can confidently check all of those, congratulations! Are you open to adopting a sad little Asian art hoe?

Today, I want to focus on the little black dress.

Quick Dose of Depression

Allow me a quick minute to orient ourselves.

World War I, originally called the “Great War” or the “War to End All Wars” (would have kept that title if not for the second world war that follows only twenty years later) had just ended.

I’m going to assume that all of you are familiar to a certain extent with World War I. In summary:

Industrialized warfare is no joke.

Huzzah, eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the Armistice. Or for all of my American readers- Veterans Day. The Treaty of Versailles comes rolling down the corridor after that.

The winners were sitting around patting each other on the back. The losers? With emotions ranging from butt-hurt to downright livid.

And my ladies?

Well, most of the nations had declared Total War. It’s basically what happens when a nation calls on ALL of their people to aid in the war effort. Men, women, even children.

That’s also when you begin to see those infamous World War I war propaganda posters:

Men went to the trenches. Women to the factories. And children to just about everything else.

After four years in the factories, doing work that was once deemed as masculine, women began to have ideas. Ideas that were once taboo due to their “feminine nature” and such ideas would surely soil their “frail minds”.

There’s actually a science to back this up- it has to do with nerves. Interesting topic: basically, females had more nerves throughout their entire bodies that were more widespread and more delicate. Sensations are faster and stronger in the feminine body whereas for the men it was the opposite. They were slower to react and “sturdier”. (Which I guess could have been used to argue that men are lacking in the intelligence category- but we focus on real science now.)

This would lead to the Hollywood stereotype of women fainting at the slightest inconvenience.

Women seized the chance to gain the ability to vote as well as creating the iconic image of the jazz age:

A woman in a flapper dress with a cigarette raised to her bold red lips.

As time went on, hemlines went higher and higher before resting comfortably on a woman’s knee and hair grew short and cropped in a tomboy-ish manner.

The name of fashion at the time was Coco Chanel, a female French fashion designer.

Diva of Divas

I’m not much of a fashion girly; I throw on a hoodie over some sweats and call it a day. Sure, I dream of the day that I’m strutting around in my Louboutin heels with a Prada ensemble that would make the devil proud but today is not that day.

Even buried underneath that pile of hoodies, I still have some knowledge of fashion.

And Coco Chanel has to be way up there.

Honestly, she deserves that spot.

Miss Chanel had quite a life before she became the name of fashion. Originally, her name was Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel. A series of unfortunate events led to Gabrielle as an orphan in a covenant which is believed to be where she learned to sew. At eighteen, she was a singer at a café to support her life as a seamstress. She got her nickname, “Coco”, somewhere along the line and it just stuck.

“My life didn’t please me, so I created my life.”

She started Chanel as an haute couture house where “luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury,”. Wealthy women were more than happy to go with her, shedding centuries of unnecessarily fussy clothing.

Her little black dress (LBD) was her most iconic work up to date. And it was revolutionary.

Chanel debuted the LBD in the 1920s, just after World War I. The dress was achingly plain with no corsets, laces, or any of the other fussiness so prominent in female fashion. Modern.

Back then, black was not chic. Black was for servants. Black was for widows. Black was church. Black was for funerals. It was almost vulgar to wear it on a casual night-out with your besties.

Which was what made it so perfect.

Widow-core

Before Lana Del Reye started her own aesthetic, Queen Victoria already had established the clout. The Victorian era corner of Pinterest is a black hole, that I for one have been sucked into multiple times.

You know Queen Victoria, she was crazy powerful. She established the Victorian Era, a sort of golden era for the British and the Irish. From this time, we got all of the famous authors- all three of the Brontë sisters, Oscar Wilde (absolute icon), Edgar Allan Poe (emo), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (“The game is afoot”!!!!!!) Lewis Carroll (Drugs disguised in a children’s book), and many others.

With the words Victorian era, you’ve already created the entire vibe and aesthetic. Beautiful little tea sets, handwritten letters, evening balls, carriage drives, jewelry boxes with little ballerinas, opera glasses- the whole nine yards.

Now just go pair that with the brutality of British Imperialism and the ravaging effects of the Industrial revolution and you’re on the right track.

I will take this to the grave:

We need to stop romanticizing the Victorians.

I swear the more history I learn, the more beef I have with them.

Back in the yonder day, Queen Victoria was the trend-setter. She was really well-known for keeping a diary and the entries regarding her husband, Prince Albert, were (according to historical gossip aka real facts) some of the raunchiest writings known to history.

We listen and we judge. Deeply.

Unlike many monarchs, the couple seemed to genuinely love eachother. When Albert died, Victoria would be very sad…to say the least.

She lived for almost forty years after Albert’s death. Throughout the rest of her reign, Queen Victoria would be depicted dressed in black as a mourning widow.

Her subjects followed suit. Suddenly, everybody was obsessed with death. It was a very common practice for mothers to take their children out coffin-shopping.

How riveting.

They were also obsessed with Egyptian mummies. (You’re going to want to sit down for this…)

Horrid stuff, honestly.

They held public viewings of the unwrapping of mummies. They ground mummies up for “medicinal” purposes. At excavation sights, they would simply use sticks of dynamite. (I look at the people with their fancy PhDs and delicate brushes…and I’m just confused.)

Again, beef.

You may continue fretting if you so choose, I have an article to write. The show simply must go on.

For the Victorians, the little black dress was a symbol of mourning which brought upon a national craze for death.

Let’s pivot to another black dress that I find deliciously scandalous.

Pinterest-worthy

I love me a good Sargent. If you know me, you know it wouldn’t have taken long for this man to make an appearance.

John Singer Sargent. One of the greatest portrait painters in history.

Got a painting by Sargent? Instant clout.

But the lore on this man…it’s delicious.

An American artist who does what every sensible artist of his day does- packed his bags and headed to Paris.

He was doing good, great, glamourous. Living the dream of every artist who heads to Paris. His teacher, Charles Emile August Carolus-Duran was the youngest and the most radical artist at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where Sargent studied.

The style he taught his students is reminiscent of Spanish painters such as Diego Velázquez, the official court painter of King Phillip IV. (He most famously painted Las Meninas) with the refreshing twist of realism that was so prominent in his day with post-impressionist painters such as Eduard Manet and Gustave Courbet.

And Sargent surpassed his teacher in this technique; elegant which defined it as high art like the masters of old yet reflected modern changes into Impressionism.

Sargent did so good at his first showing at the legendary Paris Salon (the Olympics of the art world) with a painting of his master Carlos-Duran, he got a free pass to exhibit whatever painting he wanted next.

That is mind-boggling. This was a man, in his early twenties, and he managed to do something that veterans of the art world was struggling to do. And he did it twice.

But the second time…that didn’t go so well. At least, not momentarily. That second time guaranteed him a spot in the art history world of scandals.

Quick pivot to the ravishing Madame Gautreau. The epitome of gatekeep, girlboss, and gaslight. An American hailing from Louisiana, when she made her public debut in Paris, the city practically fell to her feet.

She was gorgeous.

Aphrodite was having a good day with her.

Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau is a Renaissance artist’s dream. She was tall with pale, pale skin with a lavender tint due to the cosmetics she used. Sure, she had boarder shoulders but that only made her more picturesque. She was a walking marble statue- the picture of classical beauty.

Every artist in Paris wanted to paint Madame Gautreau.

They stalked her; spying on her as she swam (A HUGE NO-NO), using opera glasses to watch her during her frequent outings to performances and opera shows, and more.

Mr. Sargent was no different. He pursued her with a passion. Honestly nobody knows how he finally managed to persuade her to sit for him, nobody else in the whole of Paris could do it.

Note to all of my gentlemen out there: When a woman tells you to go, you go. Not the time for the “try, try, and try again” mentality.

However, Sargent did it. And it was just fine and dandy for the art world.

To a certain extent.

To put things in perspective, here’s another painting done by Sargent of Mrs. Henry White, a very important member of high society. This commission was Sargent’s most prominent to date:

You can see the difference, can’t you?

And that is the tamer version, originally one of Madame Gautreau’s straps slipped down her shoulder. (Can you smell the gossip???)

Suddenly, nobody wanted to paint Madame Gautreau anymore. If, arguably, the most influential portrait artist could paint the most ravishing socialite of their day and that was the result…did we really want to be painted by Sargent? Did we really want to paint Madame Gautreau?

By some accounts, Madame X was “simply offensive in its insolent ugliness and defiance of every rule of art…The drawing is bad, the color atrocious, the artistic ideal low…simply for the purpose of being talked about and provoking argument.” (Eccentricities of French Art - August 1884)

But others would call her “a corpse”. A horrid monster. Something from the dead. This was mostly due to her pale skin. For much of history, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, pale skin was a must for Western women. It’s not a particularly ghastly head-scratcher:

Pale Skin = Indoors all the Time (no Field Work) = RICH

That’s not just confined to the Western world. A hop, skip, and a leap of faith away in China, I grew up being taught that pale skin “hides all flaws”. (Funny how they immediately threw me into a pool the moment summer rolled around.)

It was really no secret that women have gone (and still go) the extra mile for beauty.

In Madame Gautreau’s day women ate arsenic- another huge no-no for the human body. Vomiting, bloody diarrhea, heart disease, and cancer.

This particular madame chose a powder, blanc de perle, that used potassium chloride which is what we use today for pesticides. (Woo! Used some AP Chem for that~) Besides whitening her skin, it gave her an otherworldly lavender tint.

Madame Gautreau also didn’t shy away from using cosmetics; penciling her eyebrows, reddening her lips, rouging her ears, all to make them pop against her marble pallor. This was a time when makeup wasn’t really all that. It was becoming a social norm but it was all about subtleness. You can conceal imperfections and naturally highlight your strengths (basically see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil- people didn’t want to acknowledge it), but Madame Gautreau was far more bold about her choices.

She had even gone as far as having her obvious use of cosmetics in her portrait. Which is strange considering the (VERY) common practice of having painters edit your portrait.

You want cheekbones? I got you bae.

Annoying pimple? Don’t even worry about it.

Bad hair day? I can give you shampoo-commercial quality locks.

Bald? Same goes for you.

Madame Gautreau didn’t need cosmetics. Critics were almost disgusted with her, that haughty expression so thoroughly obsessed and almost-arrogant confidence in her beauty.

And that dress.

Simple scandalous.

Being painted in that black dress may have literally ruined her, but here’s the thing-

She chose that dress. Sargent had only agreed to her wishes.

She chose it to highlight her beauty. It was her choice.

And that’s important to remember.

This painting, between a painter who “seized our [the French’s] medals, such as M. Sargent” and a “pretty women eclipse ours [the French] like Mme Gautreau.” Two of the most well-known Americans in Paris (“All good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”) who cooked up something like this that quite literally flipped the art world.

And it was a portrait, a commission. Those don’t usually cause all that much of a sensation.

Madame Gautreau’s mother literally stormed into Sargent’s studio, demanding that he take down that painting of her daughter. That didn’t do much.

Sargent had to flee Paris and set up shop in Britain where he continued a life as a portrait painter and easily climbed the social ladder. Despite it all, he would call a Portrait of Madame X his greatest painting and even loaned it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for some time where it was accepted far more willingly.

And as for Madame Gautreau?

She would sit for another two paintings, but they aren’t worth mentioning especially compared to Sargent’s. From then, she just disappeared from society. Rumors rose, had she outgrown her beauty?

Oh, what a tragedy it was to be a baddie.

And that’s that.

Have a nice life <3

The most talented photographer in the world would have a field day with my face.

Photography means little to me.

I wish I could say the same about the art world.

Admiring the Irony

The Mona Lisa; easily the most famous piece of art in the world. A pretty well-known little-known fact about her is that she wasn’t famous until she got stolen.

And it was a photograph that brought her to the world’s attention. Can we just admire the irony for a moment?

Leonardo da Vinci came from the heart of the Renaissance, a name practically synonymous with art history. His ability to depict reality with paint was what defined him, realistic art (Naturalism) was what established him as a great artist and won him all of the clout.

If you were to take a stroll in Venice Italy during the Renaissance, not only would you notice the horrible stench of the sewers, but you would be surrounded by the very paintings that decorates the Louvre today.

Actually-

Scratch that.

Chances are, you’re probably a peasant. No offense, I’m also a peasant in this scenario. We can share custody of a cow.

And the art?

Probably in a stuffy ballroom of the Medicis where it could be admired with a goblet of wine. Or plastered on the roof of a church done by a particularly spiteful sculpturer.

Whichever the case, art of the Renaissance was meant to reflect reality. Artists painted everything under the sun because they all deserved to be recognized.

Unless, of course, you’re a sprig of asparagus, a farmer, a shoe, a stratus cloud, a toad-

Anything deemed unworthy by an Italian artist whose main source of income is from his sugar daddy. Said sugar daddies loved biblical references and historical paintings as well as glamourous paintings of their glorious selves with a nose job.

Repeat after me:

The best artists are the ones who can make things look real.

Yeah well-

That worked pretty well,

Up until Instagram came and art had a meltdown worth of the Kardashians.

✨Girlboss, Gatekeep, Gaslight✨

Let’s be completely honest with ourselves here, we love the things that we don’t/can’t have.

And the less that there is of said thing, we go from waiting in a mile long line to scrambling over each other. Elbows flying, knees tangled, some scary lady with those long acrylic fingernails managed to skewer some poor ginger a few blocks ahead.

Evidence?

Diamonds.

They are the symbol of love; a love that is as unbreakable as a diamond.

At least that’s the very way it was sold to you.

In all truths, diamonds would be quite tacky if we didn’t think of it as priceless. Sure, it’s nice. Sure, it’s rare. But in reality, it’s really society that’s jacking up the price tag.

On the topic of price tags: Money.

I would love some money.

But isn’t it just some green paper with a dead white man’s face tattooed on it? (description may vary from region to region but I hail from the land of the bald eagles)

Another lie that’s been shoveled into your face since the moment you were born. Turning you from a baby consumer to a big consumer. As disgusting as this 9 to 5 illusion is, I’m not going to be the one to tear it down. Don’t really want “mother of anarchy” slapped over my tombstone.

ANYWAYS-

Where were we?

Art.

Come hither and we shall tither away into the land of marble booties and painted muscular babies.

Cubitum eamus?

Art is pretentious. Pretentiousness, historically speaking, is a pretty lucrative business model. (Really important, will definitely be a glorious article about this)

People are willing to spend millions on a work of art by Van Gogh, but I only spent ten dollars on my poster of the Starry Night. Even for ten dollars, I feel scammed.

A perfect headscratcher.

Here’s the reasoning:

You like it because there’s only one.

I don’t really feel the need to elaborate so I’m just going to roll into the next question-

Photography

With just a snap, a piece of art that would otherwise be a plane ticket away is suddenly plastered over your computer screen.

With just a snap, a single piece of art suddenly becomes thousands and millions of copies.

With just a snap, the art suddenly becomes…less.

Eloquently Misleading

To be completely honest, I’m not really sure how to answer this question. It’s the blind leading the deaf.

I could just slap a brilliant quote right here-

(Via photography and television) “the painting now travels to the spectator, rather than the spectator to the painting … and its meaning … diversified … At the same time it enters a million other houses and, in each of them, is seen a different context."

And-

“The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided. Sometimes the painting was transportable. But it could never be seen in two places at the same time. When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.”

Wow. They sure can string words together.

Simply put, under all of those syllables, they’re trying to say that art existed comfortably in one time and place until the camera rudely round house kicked it out of the patio door.

Anywhoozies, that meant little to me. If you can dissect it, kudos to you.

For the rest of us confused little gremlins, let us waddle together.

The (other) King of Pop

Hello to all of my lost little gremlins. Let us meet the person we will be goggling at, for historical purposes.

Keith Haring

Otherwise known as the king of pop art.

He came from the era of American artists like Andy Warhol (Soup guy), Jackson Pollock (Drizzly dude), Cindy Sherman (Mentioned her here) and many others who decided to square up with traditional art and its meaning in the boxing ring.

Only to start doing the macarena on a unicycle while singing the YMCA and waving golden pompoms in flapper dresses.

While each and every one of the glamorous, afore mentioned souls decided to tackle a different aspect of art; Andy Warhol with print, Cindy Sherman with photography,

Keith Haring called dibs on pop art.

A Brief Rundown of the Man, the Myth, the Legend

Sure, he may not have had made a crowd of fans faint with his mere presence.

Sure, he may not have sold records worth more than some nations’ GDPs

Sure, he may not once made an audience scream so loud that broadcast systems thought that there was a radio malfunction.

But he did call dibs on pop art.

Which meant that he was an artist for the common people.

Before he made it big, Keith Haring was busy spraying graffiti across New York City subway walls.

At the time, the Big Apple was the new spawning point for artists. Last century, it was in Paris with the Impressionists, now it has migrated to the land of the bald eagles.

In New York City, Haring would gain attention. People could easily recognize his art; not many people at the time would make art quite like Haring.

He would continue down this path, skipping into the sunset if HIV hadn’t come barreling down the yellow brick road.

Suddenly, Haring’s art would almost entirely revolve around this. He became an activist for safe sex and raising awareness about HIV.

To Haring, “When AIDS became a reality in terms of my life, it started becoming a subject in my paintings. The more it affected my life, the more it affected my work.”

His work as an activist is what most people know him for.

He died at the age of 31 due to complications with HIV.

But that doesn’t really correlate with my topic.

So, I wanted to focus on a different scandal with Mr. Haring (There have been several scandals with Haring- I mean he was an openly gay man in 20th-century America drawing cartoons about sex…I can see why that wouldn’t gel well with a metric buttload of people.)

We’re pivoting to Keith Haring’s Pop Shop.

WHY WON’T HE BE PRETENTIOUS???

The very mention of Keith Haring’s Pop Shop would any artist shrivel up and dissolve into a very unappreciated puddle of financial debt and mommy issues. (This was not the case for Andy Warhol, a very devout mama’s boy)

Basically, the Pop Shop was a shop full of Keith Haring’s merch. You could find his art plastered over a t-shirt or sport a dandy cap with one of his little cartoons.

This made the art community explode with squawks and fretful side-eyes. If Keith Haring, the one and only Keith Haring, would willingly mass-produce his art rather than auctioning them off for the price of 620 Rolls Royce Ghost models (Saving you the math: That’s $195 million- the same price for Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe painting) what would that mean for the rest of them?

Keith Haring didn’t give much of a damn, saying that “If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can't afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I'm all for it.”

Now louder for the people in the back Mr. Haring.

I’m not sure if photography of a painting could be considered commercialization but I know that photography is not something to be seen as the bane of the art world and its prestige.

Eloquently-

This was never art’s identity crises.

It was ours.

Photography simply made art more accessible. Now everyone’s scrambling to protect their egos

Because if everyone can see it-

How can we justify its worth?

So what did we do?

Suddenly there’s new prices, new textbooks, new definitions, new ways to decide what is worth the 620 Rolls Royce Ghost models and what isn’t.

There’s no need to lose your mind over it.

Not everyone can afford a trip to the Louvre to see Venus de Milo.

Everyone deserves to at least know who she is and what she symbolizes.

Sure, photography may have degraded art in a sense. Sure, it can’t replace the act of looking.

But the only reason you have this article to read is because I fell in love with a Sargent painting after scrolling on Pinterest.

Anywhoozies, that’s that.

Have a nice life. <3

I just discovered blue eye liner and holy gatos, I have never felt more ethereal. I’m sure there’s some color theory mixed in there, but I never learned about that. (My last art teacher was Korean and was convinced that I spoke Korean. I do not, in fact, speak Korean. But apparently, all of my classmates did. Needless to say, I was a horrible student and did not learn anything.)

So, to all of the brown-eyed people out there-

Blue eyeliner. Trust me.

Fun Fact #1: Queen Cleopatra used to line her eyes with crushed lapis lazuli, so I’m just paying homage to a baddie.

Anywhoozies, let’s pretend that I elegantly transitioned from blabbering about makeup to the tedious history of blue.

The Aforementioned Tedious History of Blue

Wow.

Did you see that?

In the European world, blue wasn’t used much, especially in medieval art. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that artists began to lock in and blue began to make an appearance.

Fun Fact #2: The Greeks didn’t even have a color for blue, that was how rare it was. They simply described the sea as the color of dark wine. (That was insane to me, the color of the sky and sea didn’t even have a name for the Greeks.)

For those of us who aren’t currently cramming for AP World History and are a little bit rusty, let me do a quick rundown to set the stage.

(I hope you’re watching Mr. A)

Rapping My Way Through the Centuries

There was this little group of hillbillies on ponies galloping away into the sunset, while setting ablaze a fiery path of carnage behind them.

Those were the Mongolians. (The dudes from Mulan)

They were brutal and amazing warriors. Western Europe was royally screwed.

Honestly, I have no idea why we romanticize medieval times so much.

So, Western Europe just went into their little timeout corner for a few centuries. Problem was that the world kept spinning.

When they managed to waddle around the coast of Africa and back to the Indian Ocean Trade Network, they were once again majorly screwed.

Western Europe went through that Hollywood movie training montage.

They decided that they loved Greek and Roman art which was obsessed with realistically portraying butt cracks.

Voila, the Renaissance.

(Which eventually leads to imperialism, coercive labor and slavery, the Opium Wars, etc. etc.)

Did you see that Mr. Skiles?

I like rocks

Let’s talk science for a moment; specifically rocks. For European artists throughout much of history, color was made through the grueling process of grinding specific minerals into a fine powder.

They, usually low-ranking apprentices, would be responsible for mixing the paints. They mixed it with egg yolk to make tempera (which is the stuff Da Vinci used for the Last Supper) or oil to make oil paint.

Ignoring the fact that a good deal of these pigments were dangerous, (much gossip, ask me later) they were pretty glamourous.

The cream of the cream was ultramarine blue.

It came from this semi-precious stone called lapis lazuli which was imported from modern-day Afghanistan.

Today, a gram of high-quality lapis lazuli can go from ten dollars a gram up to five hundred dollars a gram. To put this into perspective, gold is worth roughly one hundred thirty dollars.

Back then it was even more of a hassle getting that rock from one place to another. After that, some dude would grind this rock into a fine powder; which could take up to months, which a wealthy artist would eventually buy.

Even then, the artist would be responsible for turning that powder into paint, usually by mixing it; a task reserved for apprentices.

Now that we’ve gotten through the gritty stuff (lmao, I’m so funny…I’ll show myself out), we can finally get into the painting drama.

Petty People (A recurring theme)

As artists, we all know the pain of getting new supplies.

Do we need them? Not necessarily.

But what about the aesthetic? (Insert intense walrus noises)

Beauty is pain, people.

With blue already being on the palette of only a select few artists, usually those with influential sugar daddies, people just decided to make things harder.

Back in the yonder days with the Renaissance, the Church was the ringleader of the artistic circus monkeys. One such circus monkey, was the one and only Michelangelo. His beef with the pope, Pope Julius II, was legendary and resulted in the coveted Sistine Chapel. (Hilarious story, expect a seven-hundred-word essay with an attached bibliography from me)

As an artist, your pieces were typically commissioned by two important groups: the Medicis or the Church. While there were other rich families throwing money at artists, artists usually hoped to be commissioned by the Medicis or the Church. It was all for the clout.

With all of their influence, it wasn’t very hard for the Church to raise the price of lapis lazuli, practically banishing ultramarine blue from paintings.

They only allowed ultramarine blue to be associated with a single subject:

The Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus

The Church wanted people to know that the Virgin Mary was that girl. For art historians, ultramarine blue was her trademark and was used to identify her in Renaissance paintings.

However, simply raising the price of blue wasn’t enough for the Church- they had to ensure that only the Virgin Mary could own blue.

So they imposed a dress code, among rules that dictated the length of a cloak and the amount of jewelry allowed to be worn at a time, blue was outlawed.

As is typical of dress codes, people didn’t give much of a damn.

Several centuries later, an artist would emerge who would turn blue from the high and mighty symbol of the Virgin to the angsty color blue is now.

His name was Pablo Picasso.

Pablo Picasso (Or PP)

Admittedly, the man is a tough pill to swallow. Sure, he was a brilliant artist with his groundbreaking work in Cubism and Surrealism, but he was insanely misogynistic, quoted as saying:

“There are only two kinds of women; goddesses and doormats.”

While he did compare women to divinely being, the ball immediately drops at the next words. The perfect record scratch moment.

To Picasso, women were either his muses or just objects stripped of their humanity, a tightrope stretched so thin that she could easily be revered for a moment and be discarded in the next.

This belief is deeply imbedded in his art. Obviously, this would lead us into the “Should artists be viewed separately from their art?” which is highly debated in the art world- but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

Pablo’s Emo Era

While for most of us, our emo “phases” were the color black, or some other variant of dark white.

For Picasso, it was blue.

Let me rewind for a moment.

Picasso was born in southern Spain, on October 25, 1881. He could have been able to watch Looney Toons on his TV.

Fun Fact #3: (I just found out about this when I was trying to figure out his date of birth) Picasso’s full name was -

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

When he was twenty years old, he did what every sensible artist does; he moved to Paris. Accompanying him was his best friend, Carlos Casagemas.

The two of them had a jolly old time in Paris, eating their hearts out at Parisian brasseries, mingling with influential people over an espresso or a beer depending on the hour, and above all, going to the nightclubs. And once it was all over, the two would waddle back to their shared apartment in Montmarte at ungodly hours.

The good times didn’t last long.

One-night Casagemas was hosting a dinner at a cafe with his girlfriend, a French model named Germaine Pichot.

Drunk off of his mind, he proposes to Miss Pichot. (I should probably be using mademoiselle here, but I feel so pretentious if I do)

She rejected him.

Buddy did not take it well. He pulled a gun, (I’m not very familiar with French gun laws) cocked it, and aimed it at Mademoiselle Pichot. Fires once.

He raises the gun to his temple. Fires once more.

Germaine Pichot was able to dodge the bullet, mostly due to Casagemas’s drunken aim, by diving under a table.

Casagemas would die later that night at the hospital.

Picasso did not take it well, not even in the slightest.

In real life, he would try to “become” his best friend: painting in his style, sleeping with the women he did, frequenting his haunts.

In his art, Picasso would be stuck in the moment of Casagemas’s death; repainting his funeral again and again.

For a long time, he would try to paint himself out of this tragedy. A common theme throughout all of his paintings was the exaggerated usage of the color blue.

For Picasso, blue was his way of expressing his emotions, so much so that he would have a specific era of his art known as his “blue period”.

Compared to several centuries earlier when there were literal laws that dictated that blue wasn’t even a concept someone could simply buy.

Which brings me back to eyeliner:

Blue has gone through a lot throughout history. From saints to artists, then artists to museums, to makeup aisles, do with blue what you will.

That’s that.

I love you all very deeply.

Sure, women have been in art but they’re almost always butt-naked- never the ones behind the easels.

Feminism in art history is a more recent topic of discussion and is typically defined by groundbreaking women in the modern art world. Ladies such as Cindy Sherman and her Untitled Film Stills capturing the heart of the feminist movements, Louise Bourgeois’s spider sculptures, polka dot-crazy Yayoi Kusama, among many others.

This focus on modern art is not particularly surprising as women have constantly been screwed over viewed as the lesser sex.

With the establishment of the legendary royal art academies in France, waist coats and silk breeches dictated the art world.

Petticoats were an occasional sight. Ladies like Artemisia Gentileschi (a girlboss who painted her revenge- where’s her round of applause?) and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (the lady who painted Marie Antoinette; one of the most iconic women of history…my poor baby) have managed to shimmy their way into the testosterone-driven art history canon dictated by a book written by Giorgio Vasari.

However, it was really hard to shimmy your way in. (Much gossip; ask me later)

With the lack of women artists back in the yonder days, art historians have no choice but to pivot to more recent news.

Considering the fact that a lot of more important people with PhDs probably are already tackling this problem, I figured that I might as well latch on and amplify the drama that they’ve already considered.

Here’s the thing when you’re an art historian searching for feminine representation- you won’t find much. It is a sausage-fest, there’s not much one can do about that.

At least if you’re looking for it with a scavenger hunt list written by a man.

Giorgio Vasari.

Jot this down. This man is important.

Claim to Fame:

A revolutionary booty-kisser who wrote a book basically buttering up every artist (alive at his time) worth mentioning.

(This also happens to be the same book that art historians stake their PhDs on.)

Mr. Vasari (or Signor as the Italians say) is essentially the man who made artists pretentious. His book focused on the artist rather than the art, a revolutionary thing at the time.

While doing that, he raised the artist to a legendary status- creating the “genius artist” concept that we have going on today.

You know the drill, it’s in every movie with a brooding soon-to-be-legend;

The scene opens up with them in a darkened room; they’re a mess, their room’s a mess- it probably smells like wet socks.

They throw back a few beers; there’s some hair pulling. They showcase their work, be it on a stage or in a gallery.

They flop…horribly.

There’s a training montage, they work at ungodly hours, add in a mental breakdown just for spiciness, then…voila.

They finally sign their name on their masterpiece. Sell for millions. Life’s good.

Of course, life isn’t exactly a movie, but this “Genius Artist” or “Tortured Poets” aesthetic could be traced down to Giorgio Vasari.

According to him, the difference between a the high and mighty artist and the penny-a-dozen artisans was that perfect combination of raw skill and that harder to acquire artistic genius.

Unfortunately, according to Vasari, that isn’t exactly something one can learn. Either you were born with it or you weren’t. Sucks to suck.

This is actually mentioned in the book A Portrait in Shadow by Nicole Jarvis.

It’s basically the Italian Renaissance version of Babel; great idea, slow af execution, 6.5/10 rating. I will definitely take a deep dive on this eventually but the protagonist, Artemisia Gentileschi (girlboss mentioned above) reflects on it. She was talented at birth but says that it takes more than just skill to become an artist. (I couldn’t find the exact quote…I hate bibliographies. Do not ever expect to read the words “Please see attached bibliography” in here- if you know, you know) You need magic (the book takes a fantasy turn) to “weave” into your art, which is something you’re born with. Again-

Sucks to suck

Even if a woman managed to complete this checklist completed by a man, she never got really far. Women who did manage to scavenge an education in the arts only had a single path; oil painting, as sculpting was seen as too messy for the delicate womanly mind.

Even within oil painting, they were only allowed to paint mundane things at the low end of the art hierarchy, such as still life. The highest were of course allegorical and historical pieces. Those pieces almost always depicted males in the nude, which shocker, women were deemed to “impure” to paint for fear of shattering our little minds with sexual thoughts. (Do we see the irony here?)

Because here’s the thing, the definition of art was quite literally made by a man.

Whereas crafts women did engage in such as weaving and embroidery aren’t what one would categorize as art.

This is where it gets complicated; where do you draw (Lmao, I’m so funny…I’m sorry) the line?

If you expand it to include embroidery, then what about other forms of skilled artistic expression? If embroidery gets a say, then what about dance? Music? Acting? Pottery? And since we’re already there, why not throw in cooking as well? The French seem pretty adamant about that.

Women are noticeably absent in the canon of art history (as well as people who have slightly different skin variations besides white, but that’s something to tackle for future Bonnie). To make space for them, you literally have to redefine traditional forms of art.

The men who wrote the canon of art history ensured that the checklist could only be done by men while pieces made by women would be titled as a craft; domesticated and decorative.

The problem was never about talent- it’s because of that impossible checklist made by men for men. That might not change for a long time; at least not when we’re still debating the difference between craft and art.

While we’re at it, why don’t we give the ladies a moment?

That’s that.

Love y’all, have a nice life!

<3 Bonbon

Subscribe now

Hello

Hi. My name is Bonnie Yang, but you can just call me Bonbon. First and foremost, I wanted to make this perfectly clear:

I made this entirely out of spite (and a healthy dosage of aesthetic longing).

1. Spite is a Perfectly Valid Reason

As a failed art student, here’s the mindset:

If you can’t get as good as the greats, dig up a crap ton of dirt on them and make them roll around in their graves just for giggles. (This is not going to be an incredibly pretentious source for art history, but I will try to keep myself PG-13- I am not making any promises)

Dead men can’t sue me and try as they will to curse my descendants, this bloodline ends with me.

2. Character Development?

I wasn’t really sure which vibe I wanted to give off, but I figured that it is what it is. Chances are, you will be here for most of my character development.

My name is Bonnie Yang, but friends, enemies, and people in between call me Bonbon. I’m a sophomore in high school and AP Chem is the bane of my existence. This has been a pretty puny existence thus far.

I randomly got obsessed with art history. There’s not much lore there, I just saw a really beautiful John Singer Sargent painting (we will definitely get into him eventually) and sold my soul to learning about dead artists.

3. Housekeeping Rules

Huh. Never was a huge fan of my elementary teachers telling us about the “housekeeping rules” about how you should “treat others the way you want to be treated” and to think of us as a “big happy family.”

Anywhoozies, for lack of better words, let’s set up a few housekeeping rules:

For one, as glamourous as I’m sure I sound in writing, I am actually a high school sophomore. (Sophomore slump is real, I can attest to that- I’m literally writing this the night before my finals) Interpret that information as you may but do keep in mind that I am only human.

I’m not here to regurgitate a Wikipedia article or shove a biography down your throat. This is not meant to be an art history 101, I am simply here to think out loud.

4. Without Further Ado…

Anywhoozies, you’re here, I’m here.

Welcome to the Art Hoe Archives with your favorite Asian art hoe (c’est moi!) to lament upon the atrocities of the art world (I assure that there are many), get the centuries old gossip of people who are surely maggot food by now, and go through the lore that brought us here to the banana-taped-on-a-white-canvas madness that we have going on today.

Love you, have a nice life!