Ukraine's got talent - Down the Rabbit Hole

Mika Newton from Ukraine at Eurovision Song Contest 2011 in Düsseldorf (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sand painting

A  Quick TV Review, Plus Interview

Interview with artist

UK's Guardian Grapples with the 'Art' of It 

Ukraine and the Nazis

On Wikipedia 

An English-Language Newspaper Story 


Mika Newton and Simonova

Added this 5.13.16.


Depending on her subject matter, her work can seem facile, sentimental, kitschy. This may be an example of the limitations of a form or genre that is trying to establish itself among "the people," not the elites. Perhaps - like popular music - a form needs to establish itself, to become sufficiently widespread in appeal that practitioners try to extend its established and recognized possibilities, its conventions.  Perhaps by "creative" we most often mean some advance or surprise in a genre with which we are already familiar and thus have a historical basis against which we can judge its newness.

Here's a favorite quote that I *usually* share six times a semester that is useful in encountering the New, the Strange the Ugly:

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” - Flannery O'Connor