Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 137
January 30, 2017
Diana deserves the best of British sculpture – not some tacky statue
Princes William and Harry are commissioning a statue of their mother for Kensington Gardens. If it ends up being bland and bronze, it will be a betrayal of Diana’s modern image
Do Princes William and Harry realise what they are stirring up? They are going to commission a statue of their mother for the grounds of Kensington Gardens. It is more than understandable for them to seek to honour Diana’s memory. But how will the artist be chosen?
Related: Princes William and Harry plan statue of their mother, Diana
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January 28, 2017
The charisma droids: today's robots and the artists who foresaw them
RoboThespian and the world’s first automaton newsreader are the stars of the Science Museum’s Robots show. But did Da Vinci and Michelangelo beat them to it?
An android toddler lies on a pallet, its doll-like face staring at the ceiling. On a shelf rests a much more grisly creation that mixes imitation human bones and muscles, with wires instead of arteries and microchips in place of organs. It has no lower body, and a single Cyclopean eye. This store room is an eerie place, then it gets more creepy, as I glimpse behind the anatomical robot a hulking thing staring at me with glowing red eyes. Its plastic skin has been burned off to reveal a metal skeleton with pistons and plates of merciless strength. It is the Terminator, sent back in time by the machines who will rule the future to ensure humanity’s doom.
Backstage at the Science Museum, London, where these real experiments and a full-scale model from the Terminator films are gathered to be installed in the exhibition Robots, it occurs to me that our fascination with mechanical replacements for ourselves is so intense that science struggles to match it. We think of robots as artificial humans that can not only walk and talk but possess digital personalities, even a moral code. In short we accord them agency. Today, the real age of robots is coming, and yet even as these machines promise to transform work or make it obsolete, few possess anything like the charisma of the androids of our dreams and nightmares.
Related: Future thinking: will artificial intelligence overtake humans? – tech podcast
Continue reading...January 27, 2017
Refugees, religion and a bear with a Rubik's Cube – the week in art
Turner winner Keith Tyson returns, while Wolfgang Tillmans and others protest against treatment of refugees – plus the rest of the week’s art happenings
Keith Tyson
Wall drawings in which the Turner prize-winning creator of the Art Machine works out his ideas.
• Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, 28 January–4 June.
Keith Tyson and Richard Wilson: this week’s best UK exhibitions
The Turner prize winner displays his epic wall drawings in Hastings, while the experimental sculptor’s new show reimagines space
Once there was a machine that made art. It belonged to Keith Tyson, who in the 1990s played with the idea of a completely random, automatic way of creating art when the digital age was still in its infancy. Two decades and a Turner prize later, Tyson is back with a display of the epic wall drawings in which he works out new ideas. These are pieces that veer between the sublime and the silly but, most of all, they are spectacular evidence of the survival of drawing as an art in the 21st century.
Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, Saturday 28 Jan to Sunday 4 Jun
January 26, 2017
Christo cancels artwork to protest Trump – but we need his vision
The legendary land artist has wrapped up a Colorado installation after decades of planning in disgust at Donald Trump. But artists must allow their work itself to be the dissenting voice
Christo, the renowned Bulgarian-born wrapper of islands, parks and other landmarks has become the latest artist to protest against Donald J Trump’s presidency. Christo became a US citizen in 1973, and has been working for 20 years to develop one of his most ambitious projects – and that’s saying something – in the American west. He proposed to erect six miles of silver-coloured fabric over a Colorado section of the Arkansas river for two weeks. The immigrant from postwar communist eastern Europe believes in paying his own way, so it was going to cost him $50m. It has been a tough struggle – not least because environmentalists have opposed his plans.
So shocked is Christo by Trump’s election that he has now abandoned his dream of covering up a Colorado river. The artwork would have been put up on federal land; “I can’t do a project that benefits this landlord,” he says, referring to Trump.
Continue reading...January 25, 2017
To understand Trump, we should look to the tyrants of ancient Rome
His disdain for the norms of democracy makes it hard to understand the US president – but he has precedents in emperors such as Commodus, Nero and Tiberius
He looks like a strong man – the strongest. Holding a huge club to beat his enemies with, the Roman emperor Commodus wears a lion skin over his bearded, empty-looking face in a marble portrait bust made in the second century AD, which is one of the treasures of Rome’s Capitoline Museum. He is posing as the mythic hero Hercules, whose muscular might made him victorious in one spectacular fight after another. The portrait literally equates the strength of Hercules with the power of the emperor.
Related: Donald Trump's first 100 days as president – daily updates
Continue reading...January 24, 2017
Welcome to the world's smallest art fair – on a disappearing speck of sand
The art at the Biennale de la Biche off Guadeloupe is set to disappear into the sea, thereby mirroring the futility and emptiness of elite events like Venice Biennale
Art in the 21st century is a floating world of curators and collectors, gallerists and critics, that generates a constant fleeting excitement without leaving much behind to impress future generations. It is a closed circuit of mutually fascinated Instagram stars exchanging the glamour of art for the lubricant of money; a school of digital sharks who need an unceasing diet of the new to keep them alive in the ocean of information; a party whose guests are scared to leave in case they are forgotten. Or, to put it another way, it is defined by biennales, those festivals of new art that can briefly attract a very engaged and very affluent audience to any location on Earth.
Biennales don’t create much of permanent value, and the art they promote rarely speaks to an audience beyond the self-defining art elite. But they seem very important at the time, to everyone involved. This year sees the big one, the Venice Biennale, back for its 57th instalment. It also sees a very little one, whose Lilliputian ambitions cast a surreal Swiftian light on the lunacy of the art world circuit that will also include Documenta 14 as well as the usual run of art fairs from Basel to, er, Basel Miami Beach.
Related: Great exhibitions: 2017's best art, photography, architecture and design
Continue reading...January 23, 2017
We must rescue Van Gogh from becoming a pop culture cliche
Loving Vincent is a corny new biopic made from 62,450 hack oil paintings in Van Gogh’s style – and is an insult to the human struggle in his original works
Vincent van Gogh is peculiarly cursed to be travestied, misunderstood and reduced to a kitsch parody of himself. Look at the art section in your local bookshop and you will find a glitzy new publication of his “lost” Arles drawings being heavily promoted even after the Van Gogh Museum denied the drawings in it are by Van Gogh at all. Now more fake Van Gogh is on its way, with the release of the trailer for Loving Vincent, a feature film about the artist that has been made by animating oil paintings that ape his style.
The makers of this film commissioned 62,450 oil paintings by 115 professional painters to use as frames in the film, which will include 94 of Van Gogh’s own paintings “integrated” into the animated flow of images.
Continue reading...January 22, 2017
Adrift in a dreamworld – the genius of Michael Andrews makes us doubt our own eyes
He left behind 1950s Soho to spraypaint wondrous landscapes full of rocks, shadows and mystery. This show finally captures the brilliance of Michael Andrews
In his painting The Colony Room I, Michael Andrews pays homage to two giants of British art. You can’t miss them. One is a short, orange-haired figure in a bomber jacket turned away from us with his paunch spilling out of his trousers. This is unmistakably Francis Bacon. “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends!” the gutter genius is no doubt declaiming, as was his wont. From the group around him, a keen angular face stares out of the painting – and you sense with discomfort that you are being sized up by the all-seeing eyes of Lucian Freud.
It might seem dangerous to open a Michael Andrews exhibition in this way, given the artist often gets dismissed as one of the so-called School of London painters who worked in the shadow of Freud and Bacon. And this work isn’t just a reminder of their fierce glamour – other Soho bohemians mill around in this louche history painting, too. So is Andrews just part of that crowd, an interesting bit player in the story of modern British art?
Continue reading...January 20, 2017
Melting ice, 1920s graphics and Newcastle's finest – the week in art
Richard Wilson returns with site-specific installations and Haris Epaminonda’s meditative collages go on show – plus the rest of the week’s art happenings
Richard Wilson
The experimental sculptor who gave modern British art one of its truly great works, his tank of reflective oil 20:50, shows new site-specific installations.
• Annely Juda, London, from 26 January-25 March
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