Watching “Five Broken Cameras” and “How to Survive a Plague”—two outstanding documentaries nominated for yesterday’s Academy Awards—it’s easy to be reminded of what a gift this kind of attention can be for the community or person being featured. Yet watching Emad Burnat’s young son Gibreel stand center stage with his own camera, filming the Docuday audience during Saturday’s question-and-answer session, it’s also hard to shake[.....]

Today from the DS Archives we bring you two artists working during the early to mid 20th century: Kurt Schwitters and Georges Braques. Schwitter’s multi-media collages were recently shown in the US for the first time in 26 years, and Braques’ Cubist still lives are on view at the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, MO until April 21, 2013. For the first time in[.....]

As a part of our ongoing partnership with Art Practical, today we bring you a feature from writer Genevieve Quick. In her piece, The Way Beyond Art: Infinite Screens, Genevieve explores the 5-channel video installation Hearsay of the Soul, 2012, by acclaimed artist and filmmaker Werner Herzog. As the fourth and final installment of its exhibition series “The Way Beyond Art: Infinite Screens,” the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts[.....]

For this edition of Fan Mail, Josh Highter of Berkeley, California has been selected from our worthy reader submissions. Two artists are featured each month—the next one could be you! If you would like to be considered, please submit your website link to info@dailyserving.com with ‘Fan Mail’ in the subject line. Josh wrote about his paintings as “inventions shaped by forces of society, economics, technology,[.....]

Born in 1962 of parents who were attached to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Geng Jianyi grew up in a country shaped by rigid, state-mandated structures that had, by the late 1960s to the early ‘70s, fallen a long way short of the idealistic socialist Chinese state that Mao Zedong had envisioned. Where solidary socialism was intended to create commitment to the system by way[.....]

For both Walt Disney and Llyn Foulkes, it all started with a mouse. Mickey, to be precise, accompanied both men throughout their respective careers—Disney in a manner of lucrative iconography, and Foulkes in a manner of psychological distress. To most, the cartoon rodent was the paragon of jubilant youth, but through Foulkes’ lens, Mickey was a sanitized, furtive representative of the rats infesting the politics,[.....]

Today from the DS Archives we bring you the 2011 exhibition, “Vision and Communism”at Smart Museum at the University of Chicago in Chicago, IL and the current exhibition “Without Reality, There is No Utopia” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Both exhibitions address the effects Communism and politics have on culture and art. The following article was origianally published on November 8, 2011 by Randall Miller: On the night of[.....]