My column in September's ArtReview magazine. Read the entire issue for free at www.artreviewdigital.com "Do you remember things? Actual things? And you could touch them, couldn't you, remember? The physical world, I'm talking about -- remember it, older people? Matter? The older people, they remember… actual matter. Remember? Things? And it was all real and it all existed, yeah? Not like now." I'm watching… Continue reading Fear of things
Category: comment
The value of art school?
My column in April's ArtReview magazine. Read the entire issue for free at www.artreviewdigital.com What’s the value of an art college education? And is it really worth getting into shitloads of debt for? That’s the question that continues to grind away in the world of UK higher education, as students this year begin to face… Continue reading The value of art school?
Art, politics and branding
It may be cold in Europe at the moment, but in the fraught relationship between art and the political world, things only seem to be getting hotter, with controversies breaking out all over the place. A characteristic of recent upsets is the way that artists’ freedom of expression comes into conflict with public and private interests, especially when this freedom shifts from ‘artistic’… Continue reading Art, politics and branding
Frieze Art Fair 2011
"Was the lack of booze a sign? Previously on opening night in the big tent, waves of waiters would set out at a given time to distribute a slow flood of Pommery, gradually inebriating a crowd of revelers..." Read my commentary on this year's Frieze Art Fair, for Art Agenda
British Art Show 7: in the Days of the Comet
My critique of British Art Show 7 out now in the new September issue of ArtReview magazine. Sign in and read it at www.artreviewdigital.com If there is an emblematic work in British Art Show 7, it’s the one that critics thought had the most tenuous relationship to the exhibition’s supposedly ‘national’ remit – Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010). While Marclay… Continue reading British Art Show 7: in the Days of the Comet
The Art of Taking Offence
Just as I’m trying to wind down from the year’s art controversies, along comes another art-and-Jesus blowup. Crucifixes in art have not had a good time of late: in the US , there was the December debacle surrounding the Smithsonian’s panicky decision to pull a clip of David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video A Fire in My… Continue reading The Art of Taking Offence