Ben Sakoguchi "Unauthorized Baseball" Paintings to Irvine
Ben Sakoguchi, from "The Unauthorized History of Baseball," 2008. UC Irvine Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art |
The UC Irvine Langson Institute and Museum of California Art has acquired three paintings from Ben Sakoguchi's "The Unauthorized History of Baseball" series. Janet Mohle-Boetani, MD, supplied funds for the purchase.
The baseball pictures are themselves a subset of Sakoguchi's paintings inspired by the graphic design of mid-20th century California orange crate labels. For Sakoguchi the orange crate labels are emblems of consumerism, modernism, colonialism, race, and the American (California) dream. The baseball pictures add a fan's obsessive knowledge of the American pastime that captivated Sakoguchi's father, a grocer who sold oranges and spent the war in an Arizona interment camp.
Comments
Sakoguchi would certainly fit the format of the upcoming Lucas Museum, which may or may not affect today's art scene---of figurative, representational, conceptual and abstract.
I've seen so much figurative nonsense, I give it no credit as a superior conveyor of artistic meaning.
We've had 50,000 years of figuration in art, and less than 200 years of abstraction. I applaud abstraction for how it makes me feel: fear; love; anger; pain.
You say it's easier to create. I disagree.