Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 160
May 23, 2016
Explosions in the sky: why Mount Etna erupting is as pretty as a painting
Turi Caggegi’s recent volcanic YouTube footage is uncannily similar to Joseph Wright’s 18th-century art of Vesuvius – both capture an Italian night on fire
Images of Mount Etna spewing molten rock and fire in its latest eruption reveal once again the astonishing and dangerous beauty of volcanoes. These living mountains can be colossally destructive, yet Etna’s frequent eruptions are “Strombolian” events, sending superheated rock and fire-lit ash high in the air without the fast-moving pyroclastic flows that can be devastating to human life.
Over the weekend, Sicilian journalist Turi Caggegi was able to get near the summit with a video camera and capture the wonder of a night on fire. Apart from their luminous beauty, these images of an Italian volcano vindicate one of Britain’s greatest painters.
Related: Joseph Wright – review
Related: Pompeii: is this the best they can do with €105m?
Continue reading...
May 20, 2016
The face of American fascism? Decoding sheriff Joe Arpaio’s anti-bestiality video
His address is like a parody of Donald Trump, revealing the absurd and fictional nature of the demons they pursue and the emergencies they promise to resolve
Is this the face of American fascism? Whiter than white – his hands skeletally pale – and showing all his 83 years, Joe Arpaio, the minority-persecuting sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, warns the public against yet another enemy in its midst. First it was Barack Obama, who Arpaio insists is not a true-born American. Then it was anyone who looks to his officers like they may potentially be an illegal immigrant. In February he was rebuked by a US district court for ignoring orders to cease his policy of arresting people simply on suspicion of illegal immigration.
Related: Sheriff Joe Arpaio battles beastiality with Craigslist stings: ‘This is my crusade’
Continue reading...Jeff Koons, Creed cheese and Grayson Perry's phallus – the week in art
Cory Arcangel swaps canvas for clickbait, Ai Weiwei gives his verdict on the EU and the weird world of Victorian medical models – all in your weekly art dispatch
Found
Cornelia Parker curates artists including Jeremy Deller, Tacita Dean and Christian Marclay in a contemporary response to Captain Coram’s Foundling hospital, a progressive creation of the 18th century Enlightenment strongly supported in its early days by William Hogarth.
• Foundling Museum, London, 27 May-4 September.
Five of the best… exhibitions this week
Found | Martin Creed | Ori Gersht | Maria Merian | Pablo Bronstein
London’s Foundling Hospital is a great institution of the Enlightenment. It was started by the 18th-century sea captain Thomas Coram to care for abandoned children, and luminaries such as Handel and Hogarth contributed art to its cause. Coram’s project still inspires creativity today, as this exhibition curated by Cornelia Parker demonstrates. Among the Hogarths here are Tacita Dean, Jarvis Cocker and Jeremy Deller.
Continue reading...May 19, 2016
Jeff Koons: Now review – Damien Hirst's joyless paean to Donald Trump of art
From sexed-up Hoovers to kitsch kids’ toys, Hirst’s celebration of his biggest artistic influence is empty of emotion, revealing the shallowness of his own art
Jeff Koons is hunched up naked like an animal, making love to the porn star Ilona Staller, his then wife, in a 1991 picture from his Made in Heaven series. It is an image of male conquest a Wall Street broker from a Martin Scorsese film would buy . As a self-portrait, it tells you everything you need to know about Koons and quite a bit about his avid collector, Damien Hirst.
Related: Jeff Koons: ‘People respond to banal things – they don’t accept their own history’
Continue reading...May 18, 2016
Radical or retrogade? Yinka Shonibare can't redeem the Royal Academy
The RA has real cheek to present itself as a champion of the new with its Shonibare awning when it has tried so hard for centuries to fetter British artists
Does the Royal Academy ever tire of celebrating itself? The venerable British art institution has just unveiled an amazingly self-congratulatory public artwork. While its Burlington Gardens site, at the back of the main venue, is being renovated, the facade has been covered by a celebratory montage by Yinka Shonibare that makes the RA look like a cheerfully radical home to subversives, not to mention a citadel of multiculturalism and equality.
Related: Five of the best… new art shows
When Sir Joshua Reynolds died
All nature was degraded;
The King dropped a tear into the Queen’s ear;
And all his Pictures Faded.
May 17, 2016
Master Strokes: Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the Golden Age review – a lust for life
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The Flemish are precise and the Dutch are florid – but they all share a Falstaffian appetite for life. Innkeeper, more beer!
Related: Rubens, Rubens, everywhere
Dutch and Flemish art are as different as gouda and pancakes – at least it seems that way, looking at oil paintings. In the Renaissance, these regions of northern Europe were divided by war and religion. The birth of the Dutch Republic in 1581 created a Protestant but tolerant culture whose merchants rapidly spanned the globe and brought wealth and energy to Amsterdam. Meanwhile, the Flemish region that would become modern Belgium remained Catholic and under Spanish rule.
Continue reading...May 16, 2016
Sunken Cities review – archaeology dressed up as action movie
British Museum, London
This frustrating show about the ‘lost worlds’ of the Nile Delta has too much Indiana Jones nonsense – and not enough genuine wonders
The shiny black statue of a woman from ancient Egypt who may as well be naked floats, without head, hands or feet, among blue walls, low lights and eerie recorded underwater noises. This sculpture may be the most erotic celebration of brother-sister incest ever chiselled. Of course, it’s not exactly a competitive field. Incest is not a mainstream artistic subject, except in the submerged ancient cities of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion.
Related: Drowned worlds: Egypt's lost cities
Continue reading...May 13, 2016
Vagina kayaks, sunken cities and a cheeky Turner list – the week in art
Bacon hits Merseyside, the Panama Papers inspire ‘offshore paintings’, and we reveal African photography’s rising stars – all in your weekly art dispatch
Sunken Cities
Egypt is the most darkly alluring of ancient cultures. Underwater archaeology is one of the most adventurous ways to study the past. Put them both together and the British Museum hopes for a summer smash hit with this survey of two lost cities whose treasures have been recovered from the depths.
• British Museum, London, 19 May-27 November.
Sunken cities, vagina kayaks and a cheeky Turner list – the week in art
Bacon hits Merseyside, the Panama Papers inspire ‘offshore paintings’, and we reveal African photography’s rising stars – all in your weekly art dispatch
Sunken Cities
Egypt is the most darkly alluring of ancient cultures. Underwater archaeology is one of the most adventurous ways to study the past. Put them both together and the British Museum hopes for a summer smash hit with this survey of two lost cities whose treasures have been recovered from the depths.
• British Museum, London, 19 May-27 November.
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