New Artwork/ Quote of the Week 3.27.2011

This is going to be way more modern than my usual picks. Like not even 10th century modern- 21st century! Woah. What's crazy is that I even like this artist (shh, don't tell anyone, that would ruin my credibility). Sometimes I know the painting/work of art I want to pick or the week, and sometimes I really only know the artist that I want to showcase. This week it was the artist, Neo Rauch. Rauch was born in East Germany in 1960 and is the principle artist of the New Leipzig School of art. His painting are kind of cartoony and use bright colors. I really like them. When asked what some of his paintings are supposed to mean, Rauch responding that he didn't really have anything in mind when he was painting them, so he thought they really could mean anything to anyone. (Ha! Not all art has to mean something! Take that art historians!)Various art critics argue that Rauch draws on his life experiences (orphaned at age 4, lived through the Cold War, saw the reunification of Germany, etc.) for the social commentary seen in his works. Here is my favorite Neo Rauch painting (and it might be my favorite simply because the figures have hockey sticks. I don't know why that have hockey sticks, but I like it):

Hatz, Neo Rauch. 2002 Oil on Canvas.

And now, the long-awaited quote of the week:

"The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin."

-Jean Baudrillard, Sociologist and Philosopher. The Illusion of the End (1992), "The Event Strike", p. 26

I figured this guy must be British, because who else in the world says "dustbins"? However, he is French. Perhaps he learned English from an English person? Or maybe this quote was originally in French and a British person translated it into English and that is the reasoning for "dustbins".