The Canvas of a Crime is a blog around the relationship between art and crime. It started as a personal diary in which I tried to make sense of the tragedy that happened at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14th 2012. It is now an evolving place where anyone can share their knowledge, thoughts and feelings about art and crime: from legal questions about the use of images in the media to philosophical reflections about the relationship between art and violence, from historical research on criminal or controversial artists to analyses of current global events. The blog is also a site for publishing my own work.
The blog has been called “one of the most compelling we’ve seen” by Hyperallergic . The website was chosen among the “100 Blogs Worth Reading” by The Guardian in 2013.
I have a PhD in Art History from University College London (UK) where I studied Early Modern Art and its relationship with crime and violence during the 17th century. My research focused on the topic of witchcraft, images of violence and satanic imagery in Dutch painting of that period. Before starting this blog I taught Art History at the University of Milan (Italy) and was visiting professor at several universities including Erasmus University (Rotterdam) and Maast
The Canvas of a Crime is about the relationship between art and crime. We want to analyze this relationship, try to understand it and see if we can identify trends or patterns that would help us better understand the criminal mind.
We believe that there is a great deal of information on this subject that’s not been properly cataloged, organized or analyzed. A lot of people have contributed to this project, but ultimately it was born out of our own experience with art and crime.
The crime that led us to create The Canvas of a Crime was a simple theft, but we quickly realized that the act had been directly influenced by the artist who had provided the inspiration for that theft. We had become collateral damage in someone else’s story, which made us wonder what other stories were out there waiting to be told.
Telling these stories will give us a more complete understanding of the nature of art and how it relates to other aspects of society, including crime.
Welcome to the blog, “The Canvas of a Crime”, with an emphasis on crimes related to art, and how they affect the artistic community.
I’m the author of this blog, Judith van der Kolk, an artist and activist in Amsterdam. I’ve been an activist for 30 years now, but it took me over 15 years to find my voice in the art world: I studied Visual Arts at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, but became more interested in curating exhibitions and writing articles than creating my own works.
The Canvas of a Crime was born out of my interest about how other artists deal with crimes that have happened in their field of work. I have been involved in several campaigns for freedom of speech, but also for justice for victims of terrorism and human rights violations.
Like many others, I am outraged by the enormous influence that money has on society today. I see artists becoming more and more dependent on the interests of corporations, governments and financial sponsorships.
This blog will be a place where we can openly discuss these developments. Because free speech is still not dead! Let’s make some noise!
” Art and crime have a relationship that is often ignored. They are connected through art’s reflection of the world as well as its influence on it. I will be proposing a new type of art, which in turn will illuminate this relationship more fully.
The blog will consist of my own artwork, links to other relevant sites, articles about art and crime, and a summary of the information I find most important.
I would like this to be a collaborative effort between artists and criminologists, with the goal of creating an artistic theory around the relationship between art and crime.”
These days it’s hard to think of a time when the arts were less fashionable. Economic theory, like physics and high fashion, has become more abstract and specialized; but its practitioners can still claim that they are contributing to a global conversation about the fate of man. The arts are more atomized, more niche. In visual art, the only unifying force is tourism.
Faced with this situation, it is tempting to summon up a golden age, when art was not only valued but respected. When it played an important part in public life; when artists were also social commentators, and their work had an impact beyond the art world. But in fact that period was highly uneven; there were places where artists were treated as important figures from early times, and others where they were no more than entertainers or craftsmen. And even in those places where they held a privileged position, their social status was seldom secure for long. In Renaissance Florence or 17th century Holland, one day’s hero could be the next day’s pariah—of whom David Bowie is perhaps our best-known example today.
The purpose of this blog is to tell some stories about the ways in which art and crime have intersected down through the centuries—the crimes that artists have committed,
This blog is a collection of articles and essays on art, mostly related to crime, but not always so. Sometimes the only connection is that the content, theme or character in question has been involved in both the arts and a criminal act.
Tara Donovan is a New York artist who has been working for over 30 years with installation art, photography, sculpture and performance art. She has also written many essays, articles and interviews on art. Many people know her from her book “Art Crimes”, which was published in 1999. On this blog she will try to put all of these writings together in one place.
This blog is a work in progress! The content will be growing slowly, so please come back often! If you would like to get informed about new posts by email, please subscribe below.
We hope you enjoy your visit here.*
For those of us who live in the city, art is part of our lives. It’s there when we wake up, as we walk to work and while we eat lunch. But one kind of art that’s all around us, but rarely gets talked about is the crime scene art.
Commonly called “murder boards,” these painted or sketched recreations of crimes are meant to be used by police investigating a homicide. They’re also rarely seen outside of law enforcement circles.
We asked some officers and artists from around the country to tell us about their work and why it’s important. This is their story.**
