Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 152
September 2, 2016
Five of the best... art exhibitions
Real To Reel: A Century Of War Movies | Dinh Q Lê: The Colony | Lines Of Thought: Drawing From Michelangelo To Now | Foreign Objects | Grennan And Sperandio
War has blasted its way into the history of film since 1916, when a documentary about the Battle of the Somme shocked British cinema audiences. Moving images and warfare have since evolved together: war provides the camera with spectacle and emotion, as this exhibition about the making of classics from The Dam Busters to Apocalypse Now reveals. The relationship goes deeper than that, though: it was no coincidence that director Erich von Stroheim played a German officer in La Grande Illusion, because there is an analogy between the organisation of a film set and the reality of war.
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September 1, 2016
Rock's old masters: do Pink Floyd belong in a museum?
The V&A has announced its exhibition dedicated to the psychedelic jesters turned unhip stadium titans. Can they do another Bowie? Is it even art?
Has the V&A gone a veteran rock group too far? Will its Pink Floyd exhibition next year put the public into interstellar overdrive or leave us comfortably numb?
This grand old Victorian museum has sensationally expanded its audiences and horizons in recent years with exhibitions dedicated to Kylie Minogue, David Bowie and – opening on 10 September – the great psychedelic rock age of the late 1960s. While Kylie may be regarded as a camp fashion-pop detour, David Bowie Is... proved a massive critical and cultural success, helping to generate a timely comeback for the star and enthusiasm from artists who count among Ziggy’s most passionate admirers.
Related: Wish you were here: V&A announces details of Pink Floyd exhibition
Continue reading...August 31, 2016
Facebook banned Holbein's hand – but it isn't even art's sauciest
If the Renaissance master’s simple drawing breached community standards, you wonder what Facebook would make of these other delightfully erotic digits
Facebook’s habit of censoring great art has gone from the silly to the utterly surreal after it claimed that a drawing of a hand by Holbein breached its community standards.
The social media giant has previously been criticised for banning Gustave Courbet’s painting The Origin of the World (1866), a masterpiece of modern art that hangs for anyone to see in the popular Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Now, not content with censoring a painting studied by every art history student, it has temporarily banned a work whose offensiveness is very hard indeed to discern.
Hands can be obscene in art – of course they can. Fingers can be suggestive, saucy things
Related: The top 10 sexiest works of art ever
Continue reading...August 30, 2016
Art for snobs: what's keeping great paintings from the public?
Unfashionable and undemocratic, the old masters are due a makeover – not to push their prices up, but to ensure the widest possible audience enjoy them
The other night I stood in a young, boozy crowd that roared and laughed with delight at a work of art that’s more than 400 years old. Yet now I see a depressing feature in the New York Times claims that “old master” art has lost all relevance, is no longer of much interest to collectors, and may even cease to be sold by major auction houses.
The work of art that rocked Shakespeare’s Globe theatre on Friday was not a painting – it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet it was created in precisely the same era as the paintings the market is apparently falling out of love with. Why is the visual art of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries losing favour when drama from that age can still pack ’em in?
The very term 'old master' is a horrible, destructive piece of pretension
Related: Eyes on the prize: the must-see art and design of autumn 2016
Related: The great art cover-up: Renaissance nudity still has power to shock
Continue reading...August 29, 2016
Robert Rauschenberg: the leader of American art's great ménage à trois
The dazzling, haunting ‘combines’ at the heart of Tate Modern’s forthcoming retrospective were part of a private game between Rauschenberg and his peers and sometime lovers, Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns
Eyes on the prize: the must-see art and design of autumn 2016Robert Rauschenberg’s 1954 work Untitled is an upright wooden box supported by a white, colonial-era table leg over an open stage-like enclosure in which a stuffed Dominique hen struts next to a nostalgic photograph of a tall man in a white suit. Walk around this oddly compelling array – every surface of which is covered in old pictures, newsprint and smeared paint – and you find a pair of shoes, painted white. Do they belong to the man in the portrait? Who was he? Why does this constellation of stuff trigger such an undeniable, unforgettable sense of mystery?
Continue reading...Eyes on the prize: the must-see art and design of autumn 2016
Elton John shares his photography collection, Tracey Emin gets into bed with William Blake and David Shrigley gives everyone a big thumb’s-up
Neon might once have been considered a quintessentially American medium but the British artists who have worked with it are numerous. Martin Creed, Tracey Emin, Cerith Wyn Evans and Eddie Peake are just some of the homebred talents to feature alongside international names in this major survey of neon art in, where else, but Blackpool. Home to the world-famous Illuminations, first switched on in September 1879, the city has played a central role in the UK history of neon, as the Grundy’s show seeks to prove with rarely displayed designs for the biggest free light show on earth.
• 1 September 2016–7 January 2017, Grundy Art Museum, Blackpool.
August 26, 2016
Mavericks, guano and the London that could have been – the week in art
A treasury of small wonders at the British Museum, multi-screen interactives to do your head in and a Michelangelo cartoon – all in your weekly art dispatch
Lines of Thought: Drawing from Michelangelo to now
Powerful designs and suggestive sketches by artists including Cézanne and Bridget Riley as well as the Renaissance masters make this touring exhibition from the British Museum a treasury of small wonders.
• Lines of Thought: Drawing from Michelangelo to now, Poole Museum and Art Gallery, Dorset, 3 September - 6 November.
Five of the best... art exhibitions
Celts | Stubbs And The Wild | Switch House The Hive | Georgiana Houghton
Edinburgh’s summer has been packed with new art but there may not be anything else quite as poignant, strange and memorable as this exhibition of ancient wonders. The Celtic world is revealed here as a place of mysterious gods and even more mysterious art. Flowing intricate patterns, the green of bronze and the misty mountain hops of the prehistoric past create a woozy, dreamlike mood, opening windows on ancient Scotland and Europe that you won’t forget.
Continue reading...August 24, 2016
Why Vic Reeves is the strangest, most perfect presenter for BBC4’s dada season
The comedy of Reeves and Mortimer is as surreal as art by the original dadaists – so news that Reeves is restaging the artists’ antics in Gaga for Dada is a delightful surprise
There was a man on stage with a paper bag on his head, waving a stick about. There was a judge who tried people for lunatic “crimes”. There was Mr Wobbly Hand. It was all rather strange, but also terribly funny. This was the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 where the dada movement began. No, wait – it was the TV comedy show Vic Reeves Big Night Out, which ran from 1990 to 1991, and also featured Les with his fear of chives, Morrissey the Consumer Monkey and a game show called Read the Anthony Trollope Novel.
Related: Vic Reeves goes gaga over Dada for BBC4 conceptual art season
Related: A century of Dada: from anti-war artists to mainstream con artists
Continue reading...August 23, 2016
Forget 3D-printing Palmyra – this is how to rebuild ruins
Before we replicate lost wonders, we should study Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the visionary architect whose winged imagination resurrected an entire French city
Should old buildings be left in ruins or rebuilt? Does restoration bring beauty back to life or is it a betrayal of truth? We’re confronted with these questions more than ever as digital technology makes it ever more practical to repair or replicate lost masterpieces. From the possibility of resurrecting the tragic ruins of Palmyra to the more comedic tale of English Heritage upsetting Cornish antiquarians by carving Merlin’s face near Tintagel Castle, restoration is an electric issue.
Related: Spain's concrete castle: a case of accidental genius?
Related: Destroying priceless art is vile and offensive – but it is not a war crime
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