{"id":1461,"date":"2023-08-09T19:02:17","date_gmt":"2023-08-09T19:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manzodakota.com\/?p=238"},"modified":"2026-06-25T18:43:49","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T18:43:49","slug":"clown-art-and-positivism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/clown-art-and-positivism\/","title":{"rendered":"Clown art and positivism"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was in Hastings-on-Hudson NY back in June, for the “2023 RiverArts Music Tour<\/a>,” and in-between a few performances, I made my way around town into various shops and an art gallery. In one antique store, I found this clown painting by Homer Costello, and found it interesting that the tag referenced him as a “listed artist.” What exactly does that mean? I was curious to know, considering I’ve been involved in art for years and don’t recall seeing that term before, or – if I did – it didn’t catch my attention before now. A quick online search suggests that a listed artist is “… an artist with body of work known through sales, exhibitions, associations, or published articles. It’s an artist of whom a record exists.” Another definition says it’s “… a term commonly used by appraisers to describe an artist who is ‘listed’ in standard art reference books,” but also that listed artists have numerous public auction sale records that auction appraisers can reference to determine a price.<\/p>\n

I was simply attracted to the painting because it was a cheesy if not creepy clown painting, but now I’m wondering more about who is Homer Costello?<\/p>\n

From what I’ve gathered, Homer Costello lived from 1899-1977, and seemed to prefer long-and-narrow canvas proportions for his paintings, both vertical and horizontal. I’m not seeing many clown paintings, but plenty of landscapes, city scenes, and sailboats, among other things. As far as his “listed” auction prices, of course many of the auction sites want one to register in order to see sales prices, but most of the estimates I see are in the $50 – $250 range, so it doesn’t seem like Mr. Costello ever “made it big” in the art world, as far as being a “listed artist.” But then again, who am I to say? He might have sold thousands of paintings at $250 each and made some decent money over the years … who knows? (if you know more about him than what I can find, please share some info in the comments section below)<\/p>\n

One thing I found interesting while searching for info on Homer Costello was this description: “Homer Costello challenged Expressionism, he became an artist to champion Positivism.” For someone who was an art history major in college, I don’t recall hearing about “positivism” as an arts movement. I see one definition of positivism as a creative philosophy and expression of joy, happiness, beauty, and abundance, while another definition ties positivism to “critical realism,” and a third definition states that a positivist believed that the goal of science was to uncover the truth through multiple measures and observations. Hmm, I’m not sure what to think about any of that other than to say in this case, this is positively a happy clown!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was in Hastings-on-Hudson NY back in June, for the “2023 RiverArts Music Tour,” and in-between a few performances, I made my way around town into various shops and an art gallery. In one antique store, I found this clown painting by Homer Costello, and found it interesting that the tag referenced him as a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3240,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[86,210,349,371,606],"class_list":["post-1461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-antiques-store","tag-clown-art","tag-hastings-on-hudson","tag-homer-costello","tag-positivism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1461"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3241,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions\/3241"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}