Edward Lucie-Smith has rightly wondered, as ‘the contemporary art world goes dark, and as galleries – official spaces and commercial ones – slam shut their doors,’ ‘what the art world will be like once all this is over.’ However, the immediate wondering is simply, what do we do now?
1 October 2019
On my way to Tate Modern in the rain, last night, I smiled, thinking just how much Susan Hiller would have liked that there was to be an evening there in her honour. Susan could be famously grumpy and the last time we had lunch together she spent much of it complaining that the Tate […]
8 August 2019
When someone attacked Michelangelo’s Pieta with a hammer in the 1970s, the sculpture was severely damaged. It was restored and put back on display at the Vatican. A few years later a paranoid schizophrenic slashed Rembrandt’s masterpiece ‘The Night Watch’ putting a gaping hole in the canvas with a bread knife, at the Rijksmuseum.
Dame Jillian Sackler, third wife of the late Arthur Sackler has defended her branch of the family’s philanthropic donations with a statement to the Washington Post, outlining that her side of the family has never participated in the manufacture of OxyContin or benefited from money generated by Purdue Pharma, which is wholly owned by the other side of the Sackler family.
In welcoming Bill Viola’s installations at St Paul’s Cathedral, Mark Oakley noted that: ‘Viola’s art slows down our perceptions in order to deepen them.’
I’ve been looking again at Georgina Adam’s recently published book, The Dark Side of the Boom (Lund Humphries). It ranges over a wide variety of contemporary art world topics and is quite largely concerned with recent art world misdeeds – that is, with the commercial rather than the official sector of art world activity, insofar as these can be fully separated from one another.
It has been in many ways a somewhat melancholy year for art, here in Britain – or should I say: ‘here in London’? -since pretty well all the shows I will mention here took place in a capital city that seems to be drifting steadily away from the rest of Britain.
4 October 2018
I’m what you could call a seasoned Frieze regular. I may have missed the first London fair but I was soon sucked into the great black hole of mega-international art fairs and beamed myself out beyond London to Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, not to mention the first Frieze in New York. Galleries […]
There can be no doubt that the Turner Prize is pretty much of a sick puppy right now.
20 August 2018
Nobody, I think, could be keener than I am to see women obtain more recognition for their creative contribution to the visual arts.
At a time when London’s big art museums are going all out to be populist, they also seem to be witnessing a fairly general fall in attendances.
24 May 2018
High value bluechip contemporary art displayed at alternative venues is usually something that excites us here at Artlyst; however,
The Royal Academy’s radical extension of its premises including some splendid new exhibition spaces and an imposing new lecture-theatre excites me, but also generates some doubts and mixed feelings.
This year’s list of finalists for the Turner Prize has just been announced. While the names on the shortlist are virtuously unfamiliar, the general artistic direction is not.
Overshadowed by iconic images from Picasso 1932 and Bacon/Freud two of the Tate’s current exhibitions feature powerfully expressive crucifixion images.
I’m just back from a visit to Prague. I went there specifically to see an exhibition of new British painting organised by an organisation called ArtLines
The latest in a long line of examples is a new statue honouring the late artist David Bowie, unveiled over the weekend in Aylesbury.
Today (8th March) is International Women’s Day, it’s also the public opening of the new Picasso exhibition at Tate Modern. For those of you familiar with Picasso and his self-mythologized monster; you may need to read that sentence again.
With Pablo Picasso 1932 – Tate Modern’s major exhibition for the first half of this year – ready to open (March 8th), the drumbeats are already beginning.
The contemporary art world seems an increasingly strange place to be.
6 January 2018
I had never experienced a Frank Gehry up-close. Never stood slack-jawed, gawping at the gymnastic splendours that the photographs in the glossies promise.
4 January 2018
One name immediately sprang to mind – that of the born Irish, once British, now American painter Sean Scully.
31 December 2017
The British contemporary art world is apparently in a healthy state at the moment.
18 December 2017
On 5th December, seven new appointments were quietly made to Arts Council England’s (ACE) National Council, its governing board. This included the controversial choice of Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
I went to see the R.A.’s new Matisse show, but not at the press view, as I was abroad. I did go very shortly after it opened. Not unexpectedly, it was jammed with visitors, and I mean jammed. You had to dodge round backs to get a proper view of some of the smaller items, notably the drawings.
2 July 2017
What people choose to describe as ‘a masterpiece’ is usually pretty much a matter of context. On the whole, at this annual beanfeast for conspicuous consumers, you won’t find much in the way of graffiti art lurking around, though it’s just possible that you might be confronted with a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat now that he’s included in the pantheon of artists with multi-million dollar price tags.
Last October I was in Doha the capital of Qatar which seemed like a well-oiled machine when it came to Art, Education, and Culture.
Imagine in 1988 the public furore if the Tate had hosted an exhibition of queer British art – marking the 21st anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised private homosexual acts between men over 21 in England and Wales.
The current Michelangelo & Sebastiano show at the National Gallery here in London is very much the kind of exhibition that one feels a great institution ought to be doing: spaciously presented, tirelessly scholarly, you couldn’t wish for a better introduction to these major names in Italian Renaissance art.
The next two occupants of the so-called Fourth Plinth Commission in Trafalgar Square have just been announced and, true to form, the British visual arts establishment has laboured and given birth to a mouse. Or, to be fair, to two mice, one of them just slightly larger than the other. I speak not in terms of size, but in those of probable effect.
Artist George Boorujy feels particularly pumped to take on the environmental cause, especially since ‘Day One’ the Environmental Protection Agency has been quieted with regard to global warming. Boorujy, an artist devoted to highlighting and protecting our precious natural world says, “This shouldn’t be a partisan issue! Democrats, as well as Republicans, need to breathe.