What will our cities look like, post-pandemic? One side-effect of lockdown politics has been the rush by politicians, “thought leaders” and other wonks to use Covid as a pretext to impose their obsessions on the rest of us – none more so than the environmentalist agenda, with “build back better” and “net zero” becoming mantras… Continue reading We don’t need eco-loons like Thomas Heatherwick designing post-Covid Britain
Philip Guston’s KKK Paintings Must Be Shown – But Not as Pawns in the Culture Wars
The backlash over the postponement of the touring exhibition Philip Guston Now is the latest, starkest example of how museums are becoming little more than sites of social and political contestation.
Mark Leckey: O’ Magic Power of Bleakness
Ecstasy and melancholy are different kinds of euphoria. When Johnny Rotten sang, in God Save the Queen (1977), that ‘England’s dreaming’, it wasn’t the psychedelic celebration of British suburbia of, say, The Beatles’ Penny Lane (1967), but an ironic, caustic admission of a darker sort of delirium. Mark Leckey’s show is part retrospective, embedded in history, and… Continue reading Mark Leckey: O’ Magic Power of Bleakness
Art as Space Junk
Space is a strange place to want to send contemporary art, though it doesn’t stop artists (and art collectors) wanting to do just that
Hiding in plain sight
Thinking of Francis Bacon’s paintings as constantly touching on and circling around what can and cannot be shown, what can and can’t be revealed, opens a different perspective on the artist’s shifting, fugitive representation of the human body. Rather than be explicit in works only shown in private, Bacon was hinting and suggesting in public… Continue reading Hiding in plain sight
Keep politics out of art
If you want to lose friends and alienate people in the art world, try telling them you support Britain leaving the EU. As someone on the left, I’ve always argued a left-wing case for leaving. It is, to say the least, an unfashionable position, usually met with anxious looks, sullen silence or overt hostility from… Continue reading Keep politics out of art
Turner Prize 2018
Luke Willis Thompson, autoportrait, 2017, 35 mm film, 4 min. Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy Tate Photography, London In recent years the Turner Prize has struggled against the nagging criticism that it has lost its relevance and that its selections have been too ‘insiderish’. But following last year’s shortlist, when the prize abolished its fifty-year age… Continue reading Turner Prize 2018
Jennet Thomas: Animal Condensed>Animal Expanded
It’s a mistake to think that Jennet Thomas’s eye-boggling, comic, sinister, techno-folkloric videos are ‘about’ something. They are, but it does them an injustice to say that they’re about nothing more. Set in motion by some recognisable bit of subject-matter, Thomas’s narrative spins kaleidoscopically, ideas tumbling out, other ideas spooling out of those. At Tintype, the first… Continue reading Jennet Thomas: Animal Condensed>Animal Expanded
Art Market, meet Blockchain
Can you teach an old dog new tricks? And can cutting edge technology do the teaching? Christie’s seems to think so. Their Art + Tech Summit: Exploring Blockchain, which took place on Tuesday in London, was representative of the old auction house’s enthusiasm for the promise of blockchain technology, which the summit’s organisers were keen to… Continue reading Art Market, meet Blockchain
Forensic Architecture at the ICA
Institutionally, the group’s activity is indicative of how both academic and curatorial cultures have become entwined in this wider shift in the locus of political activism, with the art gallery becoming just another channel of dissemination for this broader political culture of independent and quasi-institutional activism. My review of Forensic Architecture at the ICA, for… Continue reading Forensic Architecture at the ICA