Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 155
July 18, 2016
Artwashing: the new watchword for anti-gentrification protesters
Campaigners in Los Angeles have coined a new term to stop galleries opening in poor areas. Do they want to keep urban communities segregated?
When you hear the word culture, do you reach for your copy of Das Kapital?
Some anti-gentrification protesters do. In one of the daftest and most perverse logics of the modern left, campaigners in the Boyle Heights neighbourhood of Los Angeles say that while they are “not against art and culture”, they see the art galleries opening in their streets as part of the problem. According to activist Maga Miranda, “the art galleries are part of a broader effort by planners and politicians and developers who want to artwash gentrification.”
Related: 'Hope everyone pukes on your artisanal treats': fighting gentrification, LA-style
There is such a thing as civilisation – and it looks a bit like gentrification
Related: Even hipsters and artists should be afraid of gentrification
Continue reading...
Prisma: ‘Edvard Munch did not have a “Munch filter” in his brain’
In any city that is famous for its art you will find shops, claiming to be galleries, that sell godawful kitsch sunset scenes, ripoffs of graffiti art, sub-Warholian celebrity portraits and whatever else they think tourists might mistake for modern art. Now you, too, can create “art” like that. Prisma takes perfectly nice photographs and turns them into schlocky pastiches that supposedly give your snaps the painterly styles of Munch, Picasso or Hokusai.
Related: Why everyone is crazy for Prisma, the app that turns photos into works of art
Continue reading...July 15, 2016
Bowie, Baton Rouge and the truth about Van Gogh’s ear – the week in art
The Swinging 60s sway back into the capital and a sea of naked strangers descends on east Yorkshire. All that and more in your weekly art dispatch
William Eggleston Portraits
Powerful and haunting images of the American south by one of the country’s greatest photographers.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, 21 July-23 October.
Five of the best... art exhibitions
William Eggleston | Colour And Vision: Through The Eyes Of Nature | Facing The World | Marcus Harvey | The Neo Naturists
The best photographs – and Eggleston’s are among the very best – capture life with an almost nauseating truth. From a cigarette pinched between wizened fingers to a white man and his black assistant standing one in front of the other on a carpet of autumn leaves, Eggleston has a unique eye for the strangeness of life. He is rightly celebrated as a pioneer of colour photography but that’s a drab, academic way to praise this great artist of the American south. Imagine Harper Lee or Flannery O’Connor with a camera and you’ll get close to Eggleston’s acidic genius.
Continue reading...July 13, 2016
Brooklyn Beckham's Burberry campaign – the art critic's verdict
Brooklyn Beckham has shot the new Burberry campaign. It’s not the first time a model has gone behind the camera, but do experience and famous parents make you the next Juergen Teller?
Models are arguably the best people to take pictures of models. The most beautiful and moving photographs are often documents of a particular world, taken by denizens who move in those circles. Nan Goldin’s pictures of her circle of intimate Lower East Side friends are some of the most moving portraits in recent art because she is recording a way of life that surrounds and addicts her.
Brooklyn Beckham is no Nan Goldin, but there is still nothing inherently wrong with a teenage model who happens to have famous parents being asked to shoot Burberry’s latest campaign. He is not the first model to go behind the lens. The great Lee Miller went from fashion model to heroic war photographer. But Beckham is no Lee Miller, either. In fact, it is hard to make any meaningful comparison of his work with any good photographer because his pictures for Burberry have zero artistic distinction.
Continue reading...Colour and Vision review – a mind-expanding peepshow of nature
Natural History Museum, London
From Madagascan moths to clever clams, this show brings the complex story of how – and why – animals see the world through different eyes vividly to life
Darwin’s octopus gazes back at me from its jar, eyes deep and intelligent and sentient – at least they would be if this mollusc were not a long-dead specimen preserved in chemicals. This is no distinct species, but the actual pet octopus Charles Darwin kept on board HMS Beagle. The eyes into which I peep once peeped into his.
In fact, there is an eerie sense of reciprocity throughout the Natural History Museum’s mind-expanding Colour and Vision show. It makes you aware of your own eyes as you explore this exhibition about seeing in the natural world. There are few visual experiences quite as fascinating and challenging as looking at fossils, those stony images of ancient life, as intricate and subtle as any work of art – and sometimes just as abstract. It is hard to make sense of the oldest fossils here: can the blobby shape of Dickinsonia really be life as we know it?
Some jellyfish have efficient eyes – while lacking the brain power to process the optical information
All this beauty is desperate stuff: animals evolve colour and vision to gain advantage in the struggle for existence
Continue reading...July 12, 2016
The Baton Rouge protester: 'a Botticelli nymph attacked by Star Wars baddies'
The photograph of Iesha Evans at a Black Lives Matter protest has become an instant classic. Art critic Jonathan Jones assesses the image’s impact, while photographer Jonathan Bachman recalls how he captured the shot
A great photograph is a moment liberated from time. If we could see what happened before and after this beautiful stillness and hear the cacophony of yells and arguments that must have filled reality’s soundtrack at a protest in Baton Rouge against the taking of black lives, the heroic stand of Iesha L Evans would just be a fragile glimpse of passing courage. It might even be entirely lost in the rush of images and noise. Instead, Reuters photographer Jonathan Bachman was able to preserve a simple human act of quiet bravery and give it an almost religious power.
It is not just that time has frozen but that, in stopping its stream, the camera has revealed a near-supernatural radiance protecting Evans, as if her goodness were a force field. The heavily armoured police officers inevitably look slightly inhuman. They may have good reason to wear such all-covering protective suits and helmets, so soon after a sniper killed five officers who were policing a protest in Dallas but, in their hi-tech riot gear, they unfortunately resemble futuristic insectoid robots, at once prosthetically dehumanised and squatly, massively, menacingly masculine.
Related: 'She was making her stand': image of Baton Rouge protester an instant classic
Continue reading...The whole truth about Van Gogh's ear, and why his 'mad genius' is a myth
A new exhibition claims Vincent Van Gogh’s mental illness hampered his work, rather than drove his singular vision – and presents fresh medical evidence about his notorious self-mutilation
Madness terrified Vincent van Gogh, yet he also wondered if it was inseparable from artistic genius. In letters to his brother Theo that prove him one of the great writers as well as artists of the 19th century, he broods more than once on an 1872 painting by Emile Wauters called The Madness of Hugo van der Goes, which shows the 15th-century Flemish painter – looking a bit like Stanley Kubrick on an intense day – as a victim of mental illness.
Painting, far from a release of his inner demons, was a controlled and steady labour through which he tried to stay sane
In the film Lust for Life he is portrayed as a character tragically unable to control torrents of emotion
Related: Science peers into Van Gogh's Bedroom to shine light on colors of artist's mind
Continue reading...July 11, 2016
Do androids dream of aesthetic creep? Hail the robots of post-human art
Goshka Macuga’s uncanny android is just the latest in an army of artist’s robots that began invading 100 years ago with one question: what is it to be human?
The androids have arrived, at least a century after modern art prophesied them. Artificial humans are advancing from the screens and pages of science fiction into our art galleries to look their flesh and blood cousins eerily in the eye.
Artist Goshka Macuga, shortlisted for the Turner prize in 2008, has created a talking android for her latest exhibition at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin. It has black hair and bushy beard and talks philosophy: an intellectualtake on the Action Man toys I used to play with as a child. Macuga’s robot has all the spooky uncanniness of a synthetic person with a realistically moulded face and bionic arms. Most robots have futuristic names, or cosy ones to suggest they are cute and friendly. Macuga’s creation is called To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll.
Continue reading...July 9, 2016
The glories of the V&A: six of the museum’s best hidden wonders
The V&A was this week named museum of the year. One of the institution’s biggest fans lists some of his (lesser-known) favourite things
Related: 'Unforgettable' V&A wins museum of the year award
If ever a museum deserved a prize, it is the V&A in South Kensington, London. This great Victorian creation, which has just been named museum of the year, attracts huge audiences for its blockbuster exhibitions on the likes of Alexander McQueen and Kylie Minogue. Beyond those glamorous events, however, its real strength is as a vast cabinet of curiosities, full of almost limitless surprises. Its collections contain everything from porcelain goats to a Hello Kitty lunchbox, all waiting to be discovered among what feels like miles of sometimes labyrinthine, sometimes awesomely grand galleries. Here is a magical mystery tour of some of the museum’s lesser-known wonders.
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
