Jonathan Jones's Blog

Made in Ancient Egypt review: a two-day Pyramid bender and the BC Leonardo

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Revealing tantalising new details about the real lives of artists and craftspeople, this show takes you beyond the death mythology and into the realm of magic

Who knew there were famous artists in ancient Egypt with unique styles, depicting what they saw and felt? Well, most of the time there weren’t, although this exhibition does introduce you to one. From the Old Kingdom to the time of Cleopatra, the ancient Egyptians expected very much the same things of their artists, in a style that barely changed. An extraordinary limestone stela, or engraved slab, that was lent to the Fitzwilliam by the Louvre shows how young Egyptian artists were taught to see in the “correct” way, to make nature conform to the official style. A square grid demonstrates how to calculate proportions to render, for instance, a cat in a perfectly still profile, like a little feline god, an abstraction that was to be repeated for millennia.

Yet Made in Ancient Egypt strives to take you beyond the sublime formal facade to glimpse the artists or, as it calls them more cautiously, “makers” behind the golden coffin portraits and pharaohs’ statues. “Who built the seven gates of Thebes?” asked Bertolt Brecht in his poem A Worker Reads History. Here they are, the metalworkers, woodworkers, weavers. In a wooden model made about 4,000 years ago, female workers seated on the ground weave on a loom while others stand spinning thread. You can see a fine example of such women’s handiwork, a white dress made 4,500 years ago. It hangs up, spooky as hell.

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Do people really go to galleries to answer stupid questions? Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley review

Serpentine North Gallery, London
The artist wants to tackle polarisation by strong-arming her audience into stilted debate in a show that seems to mistake social media for real life

This haunted fairground of an exhibition has its heart in the right place. But that is not enough. Called The Delusion, it is a woolly mess of platitudes and phoney dialogue. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is worried about the polarisation of online discourse and 21st-century politics. Aren’t we all? But the remedies offered are confused, and the attempt to create a free, open discussion is stymied by its coercive tactics.

You can’t say you weren’t warned. A huge text at the beginning explains the artist’s “Terms and Conditions”, including the instructions to “Join others, experience this together”, and to “talk, share, listen and question out loud”. Do I have to? Yes. As I look at an arcade-like machine in a cabinet behind a glass door, someone asks me firmly, “Did you open the door? Well, you should open it.” So I open it, answer some questions in the negative and am told off again, this time by the machine, for holding back.

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Artists face the jury, the case for Hodgkin and multi-player politics – the week in art

This year’s Turner prize contenders, a colourist’s triumphs and immersive gaming in the gallery – all in your weekly dispatch

Turner prize
Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa strut their stuff and compete for the now time-hallowed contemporary art award.

• Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, from 27 September until 22 February

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Hoi Polloi review: a mind-boggling display of technical brilliance – with bulbous buttocks a go-go

The Brown Collection, London
This gloriously eccentric personal museum by painter and former Turner nominee Glenn Brown is a mesmerising delight as it cheekily imitates the nearby Wallace Collection

You will find The Brown Collection in a Marylebone mews not far from the Wallace Collection. With its name and location, painter Glenn Brown cheekily suggests that this personal museum of the art he collects, plus his own creations, is on a par with London’s famous gallery of rococo paintings and ancien regime clocks. The joke works best on your phone map where you can see how close they are.

The current exhibition Hoi Polloi is curated by Brown and supposedly looks at representations of “the ordinary man” in art. It’s a satirical nudge at claims to social worthiness by public galleries for there is zero purpose or theme here, just a mixing and merging of the curious and eclectic in fascinating juxtapositions over four floors of a luxuriously restored building that even has a gothic cellar reminiscent of the one in the Sir John Soane’s Museum. Here you can be spooked by one of Gillian Wearing’s lifelike masks.

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Can We Stop Killing Each Other? review – a violence-themed show that’s about as dangerous as a garden centre

Sainsbury Centre, Norwich
This exhibition asks whether art can diminish the human capacity for violence – but you might want to throttle someone after seeing this nonsense

Collaborating with a fragrance company, the Sainsbury Centre has developed a scent designed to calm and induce a mood of peace. You can sample it in a “multi-sensory reflective space” created to display a Monet landscape lent by the National Gallery, one part of a constellation of exhibitions and events centred around the question: Can We Stop Killing Each Other? But by this point the only question I was asking is, why did I fall for it and make the trip to this glass house on the University of East Anglia campus?

Jago Cooper, its director, is full of bright ideas. He’s set out to inject energy into the home of the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection with such wheezes as declaring all its artworks to be “alive” – and staging shows around Big Questions of Our Time. Maybe this particular question is too big, but I think if it had been broken down and some logical clarity applied there might have been something to say – instead of saying nothing, which is what this windy absence does.

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Psycho shocks, an American superstar and Marie Antoinette’s finest fits – the week in art

Kerry James Marshall unveils a triumphant vision of Black America, the executed queen of style gets her own show, and Hitchcock puts the knife in – all in your weekly dispatch

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
America’s superstar painter shows his carnivalesque pictures which make Black people the triumphant heroes of art history.

• Royal Academy, London, 20 September until 18 January

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Naeem Mohaiemen: Through a Mirror, Darkly review – America on the brink as Tricky Dicky rides again

Artangel, Albany House, London
The infamous shooting of six US college students is explored in this mesmerising three-channel film that also takes in The Deer Hunter and Richard Nixon. What can it tell us about America today?

America is descending into violence. The president blames the radical left. Soldiers are sent in to curb supposedly violent protests. The death toll mounts.

This is May 1970 and a single month of war, civil war and music has been anatomised by Naeem Mohaiemen in his three-channel film Through a Mirror, Darkly. Mohaiemen had no way of knowing it would open as the US entered a frightening new phase of the second Trump presidency, with the shot that struck down rightwing activist Charlie Kirk echoing through sinister attempts to suppress dissent. Where will it end?

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Marie Antoinette Style review: Forget the seedy sex addict slurs – and meet the real classy, sassy queen

V&A, London
From smallpox headgear to fairytale gowns and self-modelled ‘breast cups’, this lavish show reveals a very different person from the one depicted in the libellous fantasies of the French revolutionary press

Marie Antoinette had no luck. When fireworks were lit in Paris to celebrate the Austrian princess’s marriage to the dauphin of France, a conflagration ensued, the crowd stampeded and more than 130 people were killed – although rumour put the number much higher. From the start, it seemed she was destined to be hated by the French people and blamed for sufferings she didn’t even know existed.

By the time the French Revolution had begun in 1789, Antoinette was demonised not only as a lavish spender but a rampant sex addict who cuckolded the king. Illustrations from 1790s pornographic booklets in the V&A’s epic show graphically depict her making love to a guard and to one of her ladies in waiting. By the time you get to these libellous prints, you can’t help feeling their bullying nastiness. For you have got to know her. This show is a superb lesson in how history can be understood through images and objects. It brings you as close as it’s possible to get to the real Marie Antoinette.

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Theatre Picasso review – Pablo tears reality apart in a riotous celebration of his raging genius

Tate Modern, London
From filthy kissing to bullfights, fascists and drag acts, the artist who shattered visual conventions is thrillingly, forcefully alive in this illuminating show

The Acrobat sums up the effect Pablo Picasso had on art in his 91 years on earth. In this 1930 painting, lent by the Musée Picasso in Paris, a body with no defined gender contorts into an insoluble puzzle, a leg sprouting above its anus, the head, eyes closed, bulging where genitals might be, the other leg standing on the ground balanced by an arm whose hand functions as a foot while the other arm, fist clenched, bends like a tail. In just this way, Picasso turned art inside out and upside down, twisted it unrecognisably, yet made it all the more compelling, human and passionate.

Born into a Europe of realistic sculptures and perspective pictures, he blew up those conventions, put them back together, then smashed them again, and a few times more. It’s hard not to be awed by his achievements, his turmoil of creative energy, the scale of his artistic breakthroughs, although Tate Modern tries its best. Theatre Picasso starts with coughing noises and references to gender and artistic borrowing. But those concerns go nowhere, vanishing in what becomes – almost despite itself – a riotous celebration of his genius.

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Shrinking audiences, a cash crisis and rivals on the rise: what’s gone wrong at Tate?

The museum group is struggling with its identity – while the National Gallery is not only thriving but expanding into modern art

When a national institution starts to sound like Spın̈al Tap, you know it’s in trouble.

Recently, Tate channelled the mythic rock band’s claim that its audience was not shrinking, just “becoming more selective”. In response to a decline in visitor numbers and a cash crisis leading to redundancies, the museum group emphasised “record numbers of young visitors” to Tate Modern (who cares about all those uncool visitors above the age of 35?).

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