Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 163
April 26, 2016
Alberto Giacometti / Yves Klein review – one master, one mad genius
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London
Giacometti’s expressive sculpture captures the modern condition, but in this provocative pairing, it’s Klein’s fiery alchemy that takes your breath away
I’ve seen enough of Alberto Giacometti’s art for a while. That is a shame, because there is a lot of it about – and more coming. The Swiss sculptor who gave visual form to Parisian existentialism after the second world war has a big exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich and an even bigger one planned by Tate Modern in 2017. It is hard not to respect this anguished artist of the modern condition, but you can get sick of his dry funereal austerity. It’s tiring to put on the required philosophical frown in front of yet another spindly homage to Etruscan tomb statuary.
This, anyway, is what I felt seeing his overwrought bronzes and drawings alongside the joyously playful, mysteriously visionary work of Yves Klein in Gagosian’s provocative pairing of two stars of the Paris art scene of the 1950s and 60s. It is Klein who takes my breath away. What a mad genius he was.
Related: Can an artist ever really ‘own’ a colour?
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April 22, 2016
JMW Turner may be a safe choice for new £20 note – but it's deserved
Yes, the artist is white, male and dead. But the Bank of England has honoured a radical visionary whose creativity is still inspiring
Joseph Mallord William Turner knew he’d be on a banknote one day. You can see it in his eyes in the visionary, assured self-portrait he painted in about 1799, gazing through the time vortex at his own future fame in justifiable confidence that he will always be acknowledged as the best of British artists.
The Bank of England’s choice of this white male painter who died in 1851 as the first ever British visual artist on our money may be criticised as conservative, safe and even reinforcing social hierarchy. We seem more and more to treat things like this as chances to make moral or political points. Why not a woman or artist of colour? And why not someone modern? Barbara Hepworth, Vanessa Bell, Ronald Moody or Laura Knight, maybe?
Related: JMW Turner to be face of next £20 note
Continue reading...Golden loos at the Guggenheim and Dalí's diary – the week in art
McDonalds mixes with Soviet-style art, Damien Hirst’s leaky vitrines, and Pompeii’s bungled facelift – all in your weekly art dispatch
Georg Baselitz
The brutal physical facts of ageing are among the themes of this exhibition by one of the masters of contemporary art. Baselitz reworks images of himself and his wife when they were younger and reinterprets the harsh realism of the German modernist Otto Dix. Yet more proof of Germany’s artistic preeminence.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London, 27 April-3 July.
Five of the best… new art shows
Sicily: Culture And Conquest | Mat Collishaw | Undressed: A Brief History Of Underwear | Pablo Bronstein | Jenny Saville
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April 21, 2016
If you want to live dangerously, visit an art gallery
It seems Damien Hirst’s leaking vitrines poisoned the air of Tate Modern – but who cares? We don’t expect common sense from artists – we want imagination
The health and safety inspectors are coming for contemporary art. This stuff is dangerous, people! All those spiralling slides, dodgy TV monitors reused by video artists, the installations made with who knows what flammable substances – they all have to go.
Related: Damien Hirst's preserved carcasses leaked formaldehyde gas, study claims
Continue reading...April 20, 2016
The Guggenheim's monstrous golden toilet sums up the obscene art world
Maurizio Cattelan’s working gold loo at the New York museum is a pungent symbol of the extreme price of art objects, and our love of looking at them
While the poor get poorer, the rich even get to do their crap on a golden toilet.
No, this is not the latest speech by Bernie Sanders, driven to Swiftian scatology by his defeat in the New York primary. It is a trenchant comment on wealth and luxury on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Or Upper East Backside.
Related: Manzoni and me: Gavin Turk on the artist who got away with merda
Related: How offshore firm helped billionaire change the art world for ever
Continue reading...April 19, 2016
Pompeii: is this the best they can do with €105m?
The emergency restoration – begun in 2013 – seems to have ground to a halt, with many of the lost city’s wonders hidden behind ugly fences. Call this a rescue?
What’s the point of loving Pompeii if we let it fall?
The ancient Roman city preserved in ash by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 has never been more popular. The Neoclassical imitations and fashion for “Pompeiian red” that its beautiful art inspired when Pompeii first captured imaginations in the 18th century were enjoyed by an elite. Nowadays, Pompeii is pop culture, its totemic name resounding from blockbuster exhibitions to terrible disaster films to an episode of Dr Who. And at the site itself, the crowds keep coming.
Crisis has become the new normal at Pompeii
Related: Palmyra must not be fixed. History would never forgive us
Continue reading...April 18, 2016
Sicily: Culture and Conquest review – gods, monsters and multiculturalism
British Museum, London
Ancient Sicily may have been a land of tyrants, but this exhibition shows that from the time of its Norman invasion, its culture was remarkably open-minded
Related: Golden years: Sicily at the British Museum
The Normans, those lean invaders in scaly chain mail who slayed and conquered their way into Britain in the embroidered scenes of the Bayeux tapestry, have a harsh reputation. Even though the English language, laws and politics owe so much to these warriors of Norse descent, who transformed the British isles after 1066, they have been vilified in history and myth, from the Robin Hood legend to today.
Continue reading...April 15, 2016
Caravaggio contested and bacon-smelling boxers – the week in art
The British Museum explores Sicily’s gorgeous heritage, east London bids farewell to an anarchic venue and the V&A strips to its smalls – all in your weekly art dispatch
Sicily: Culture and Conquest
The island of Sicily has been a prize fought over by all the cultures of the Mediterranean world since ancient times. This exhibition tells how Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans conquered and reconquered Sicily. In spite of enmity and war, their arts merged and fused to create such multicultural masterpieces as the Cappella Reale in Palermo, with its gorgeous mixture of Christian and Islamic styles. A great advert not just for Sicily but for the unexpectedly enlightened Normans.
• British Museum, London, 21 April-14 August.
A trigger warning on art? A daft idea – but a back-handed compliment | Jonathan Jones
Trigger warnings are a modern folktale, surely? The idea that a generation of students are demanding – in between marching against statues and banning Germaine Greer – to be warned about violent, sexual or otherwise threatening content in great works of art has, to someone who has not been on campus for years, a fictional quality.
When Stephen Fry caused offence this week with remarks about a victim culture that supposedly allows people to say “‘you can’t watch this play, you can’t watch Titus Andronicus, or you can’t read it in a Shakespeare class … because it’s got children being killed in it, it might trigger something when you were young that upset you once.” I was saying to myself, pull the other one. Just show me these colleges or theatres that would put a trigger warning on Titus Andronicus. It’s obviously all made up by free speech zealots who love to imagine an army of humourless freelance censors obsessed with closing down the mind.
Related: Stephen Fry apologises for telling pitying abuse victims to 'grow up'
Related: No one would listen to Stephen Fry if he was poor | Paris Lees
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