Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 162
May 6, 2016
Five of the best… new art shows
George Shaw | The British Landscape Tradition: From Gainsborough To Nash | Georg Baselitz | Ettore Spalletti | Dutch Flowers
George Shaw is a fascinating choice as a resident artist at the National Gallery, his scenes of poisoned landscapes now hanging alongside rural scenes by Gainsborough and Constable. Where they used oils and watercolour, Shaw uses Humbrol model aircraft paint. Yet his visions of rancid suburbia have a painterly richness that would have impressed the old masters.
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May 5, 2016
A century of Dada: from anti-war artists to mainstream con artists
A tiny but brilliantly subversive protest movement has become the common currency of big-money, mass-audience art – Dada’s founders would feel sick
It began in horror. It has ended in farce.
A century ago the world was two years into an apocalyptic war: and 1916 saw it turn more murderous yet with the Battle of the Somme, killing almost 20,000 British soldiers on its first day alone.
Related: How dada spawned the art of anarchy | Jonathan Jones
Continue reading...May 3, 2016
Wild walks, slides and crazy golf: art shows to throw yourself into
Stuck for summer fun? Well, why not play golf with Jeremy Deller, spiral down a chute with Carsten Höller, or get lost in Edinburgh’s eerie sculpture park?
Sightseeing: the most dazzling art and design of summer 2016It’s festival time, and the green fields are soon to fill with dance tents, burger stands and overflowing toilets. Art has no Glastonbury as such (and the “art” at Glastonbury tends to run to carved Green Man statues), but you can put together your own mini-visual arts festival from various enterprising open-air events this summer. So here goes.
Continue reading...Sightseeing: the most dazzling art and design of summer 2016
Dive into underwater cities, swoon over O’Keeffe’s ravishing blooms, swoosh down Carsten Höller’s slides and hang out with Hockney and his friends in LA
Global politics and domestic life, personal threat and vulnerability are consistent themes in Beirut-born Mona Hatoum’s art. The breadth of her artistic language, with its references to minimalism and surrealism, the domestic and the social, the frightening and the delicate, unfolds in this survey of more than 35 years of sculpture and installation.
•4 May to 21 August, Tate Modern, London.
Related: Beyoncé and beyond: the hottest sounds of summer 2016
Continue reading...Ai Weiwei is making a feature film: I'm worried
As an artist and philanthropist he is revered, but posing as Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi was an egotistical stunt – Ai’s art is best when he is not at its centre
Ai Weiwei is making a feature film about the plight of refugees. Will it be a serious response to tragedy – or a monument to self-indulgence? I ask this because Ai’s initial artistic response to the refugee crisis does not inspire confidence.
Related: Ai Weiwei poses as drowned Syrian infant refugee in 'haunting' photo
Related: How art is helping Syrian refugees keep their culture alive
Continue reading...May 2, 2016
Kate’s Vogue shots shouldn’t be in a gallery. They’re not art | Jonathan Jones
A Vogue cover shot is not a serious portrait. Who would expect it to be? I’ve nothing against the romantic rural pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge that decorate the June issue of Vogue. Nice face, nice clothes. But is a glossy picture of Kate Middleton in any way a serious work of art?
The National Portrait Gallery claims it is. This royal fashion shoot by photographer Josh Olins was jointly commissioned by Vogue and the NPG, and one of the pictures will hang in its exhibition Vogue 100: A Century of Style. The gallery’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, has fawningly enthused that “Josh has captured the duchess exactly as she is – full of life, with a great sense of humour, thoughtful and intelligent, and in fact, very beautiful.” The NPG is apparently working hard to turn Kate Middleton into an icon of modern art.
These are just slight and silly pictures that only a flatterer would call art
Continue reading...April 29, 2016
Naked contortions, empty exhibitions and Lego's mistake – the week in art
Polly Penrose poses awkwardly for women everywhere, as Mona Hatoum arrives at Tate and Maria Eichhorn closes the Chisenhale – all in your weekly art dispatch
Mona Hatoum
A welcome retrospective for this artist who makes the personal uncomfortably political and the familiar very strange indeed.
• Tate Modern, London, 4 May until 21 August.
Five of the best… new art shows
Mona Hatoum | Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty And Rebellion | Georg Baselitz | Alberto Giacometti And Yves Klein | Keith Coventry
You can’t help but admire Hatoum’s guts, especially when her 1994 video installation Corps Etranger plunges you into an endoscopic voyage through her insides. As an artist, she is a surreal excavator of trauma and anguish, making the personal political. Everyday objects become unfamiliar – playground swings mutate into symbols of war and the earth sizzles with menace. This is a well-deserved retrospective for a thoughtful provocateur.
Continue reading...April 27, 2016
Georg Baselitz review – colossal study of ageing, sex and death
White Cube, Bermondsey
The 78-year-old’s Germanic imagination remains as courageous as ever with this visceral and erotic exhibition that unearths perverse beauty in human decline
They are leathered by time. Their skins resemble discarded walnut shells. They might be bodies excavated from a peat bog, millennia old, or yesterday’s fruit peelings given a burial among the coffee grounds. Or perhaps these ancient humans, hanging upside down and side by side, are corpses from Pompeii or victims of a purge. Fiery ochres and charred blacks, delicate pinks and faecal shades of brown pierce the empty whiteness of the White Cube. It is a pagan funeral rite, a living entombment for Georg Baselitz and his wife Elke.
Baselitz, one of the great artists to have breathed visceral, mythic, tragically aware new life into German culture since the 1960s, is 78. I would not normally record an artist’s age but age is what his courageous new paintings, sculptures and drawings are all about. That – and love, sex and death.
Related: Georg Baselitz: 'Am I supposed to be friendly?'
Continue reading...April 26, 2016
T-shirts with Myra Hindley on them? Modern art has forgotten how to care | Jonathan Jones
Are there any limits to celebrity? Is fame such an addiction of our time that any form of it is equal to all others?
People can be famous for baking cakes, dealing drugs, taking selfies, and even occasionally for achieving something. Fame seemed to be a glamorous toxin to David Bowie and John Lennon when they asked to take a rain check in 1975, but the celebrity of those innocent days seems classy and polite now, when collective fandom seems to be the last and most irrational bond of human community. Every dead celebrity is a martyr in the eyes of millions.
Whatever Hindley's reasons, she participated in the premeditated killings of five children. Tolerance has to end there
Related: JMW Turner may be a safe choice for new £20 note – but it's deserved
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