Our tenacious students and instructors at the Siena Art Institute continue working remotely in the face of Italy’s extended national lockdown.  Through individual skype chats and group video conferences we are able to stay in touch as students work to finalize their mid-term projects for our Art & Society course group critique on Tuesday April 7.

You can follow students’ work-in-progress on their individual blog pages:

• Antonis Douroudis
• Myrto Patramani
• Angelos Sotiriou
• Rozalia Tegougianni
• Fernando Torralba

This week the Pulitzer-Prize-winning American art critic Jerry Saltz is the springboard for our group discussion in the Art & Society course.  We’ve read his article published in Vulture magazine on March 20, “The Art World Goes Dark” and some earlier materials by him such as the “New Ways of Seeing” video by Tiffany & Co. and “Navigating an Art Fair” and “How to be an artist, 33 Rules...” from Vulture magazine. He is a silly guy, but through his comedy he addresses a lot of serious topics, including challenging the entrenched systems of elitism, privilege, entitlement and censorship that seem inherent to the “art world.”

In his latest article from Vulture magazine, Saltz writes:

“Can art change the world? In respect to those suffering and about to suffer, we must say no. However, art does change lives, and lives can change the world.”