Comment on art and everything else
NFT art promised quick riches to a generation of young creators, but the reality is aesthetically embarrassing and financially perilous The Telegraph 11/09/2021 Tonight, a work called Human ONE will come under the hammer at Christie’s in New York. It’s a seven-foot box, with video screens on four sides, displaying a silver space-suited figure striding… Continue reading Spacemen? Apes? NFTs are turning art into a dangerous joke
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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