Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 164
April 15, 2016
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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Five of the best… new art shows
Fox Talbot: Dawn Of The Photograph | Conceptual Art In Britain 1964–1979 | In The Age Of Giorgione | Botticelli And Treasures From The Hamilton Collection
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April 14, 2016
Jean-Luc Moulène review – who knew French art could be so funny?
Thomas Dane Gallery, London
If spliced buttocks, breasts and goat legs are symbols of a nation in decline, let’s have more of them – this is modern art at its wicked best
I am in a ghostly garden of some forgotten chateau where grey lichen-marked statues loom in the mist among once-pollarded, now madly overgrown, trees. OK, I made up the chateau, the mist and the trees – but they are all evoked by Jean-Luc Moulène’s eerie installation of concrete rococo sculpture.
At first glimpse his groups of nudes and fauns appear time-worn and authentic. Then you see how he has hacked through these concrete casts with a powerful cutting tool and spliced them together in weirdly unsettling groups. Buttocks and breasts, goat legs and modest downcast eyes are disturbingly spliced together in a manic montage, the classical tradition gone psycho. Who says French culture is dead?
The things Moulène does with pigs reveal a genius for charcuterie
Continue reading...April 13, 2016
The so-called Caravaggio in the attic looks like a fake to me
A supposedly 400-year-old painting found in Tolouse has the old master’s cinematic lighting and lurid focus. But where is the psychological intensity?
I am sorry but it is all too good to be true. The owners of an old house near Toulouse ventured into their attic and found a large dusty painting. When a local antiques dealer gave it a gentle clean, he recognised it as a painting by – or closely associated with – none other than the great Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
Related: 'Lost Caravaggio' found in French attic causes rift in art world
What’s the Judith of Toulouse playing at? She has drifted off, right in the middle of hacking off a man's head
Related: The Complete Caravaggio part one
Small details are often the crucial clues – look at the hands of Holofernes, at his filthy fingernails
Continue reading...April 12, 2016
London doesn't need a Smithsonian – but how about Hull?
The US museum giant cannot compete with London’s world-class spaces – it should do a Guggenheim and build in England’s neglected north instead
Does London really need a branch of America’s vast multi-venue, multi-channel Smithsonian museum? Even the Smithsonian seems to be having second thoughts. It has been in talks to open a new venue at London’s former Olympic Park and was due to announce a decision this week, but it now wants to find out more about fundraising and the proposed new building before going ahead.
I think it should change course entirely. Of all cities in the world, London seems the most bizarrely inappropriate and ill-favoured for a mission of US cultural imperialism … sorry, I mean enlightenment. The Smithsonian should look at the Guggenheim Museum’s success in Europe and learn from that.
Related: Fit for McQueen? London's big three museums exhibit Victorian era values
Related: Museums are now part of Britain's pernicious north-south divide
Continue reading...Portrait horribilis: why it’s so hard to draw the Queen
The awkward portrait on Australia’s new five-dollar bill is just the latest unflattering depiction of Elizabeth II. Artists are falling foul of the fine line between regal myth and obvious lies
Why has Australia put an unsmiling, awkward, unflattering portrait of the Queen on its new five-dollar bank note?
It is tempting to see Her Majesty’s apparent displeasure as a reflection of the monarchy’s ambiguous standing in Australia, where republican sentiment – although on the wane, according to opinion polls – is far more common than back in the old country. But Australian voters rejected a republic in 1999, and so long as the Queen has a constitutional role she gets her head on the currency. Yet this less than authoritative image surely reveals an ambivalence, a hesitance in vaunting the regal visage.
Continue reading...April 11, 2016
Palmyra must not be fixed. History would never forgive us
Sometimes ruins are better left as ruins. Just because we have the 3D printers to undo Isis’s vandalism doesn’t mean we should use them
Palmyra must not “rise again”, as Syria’s director of antiquities has promised. It must not be turned into a fake replica of its former glory. Instead, what remains of this ancient city after its destruction by Isis – and that is mercifully more than many people feared – should be tactfully, sensitively and honestly preserved.
Related: Palmyra after Isis: a visual guide
This Isis attack was not a counterfactual fantasy. It really occurred
Continue reading...April 8, 2016
Rolling Stones, stolen Munch and the €1bn flop of Les Halles – the week in art
Art is not immune from the biggest document leak in history and Glasgow International kicks off for another year – all in your weekly art dispatch
Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979
This delve into the wacky world of Britain’s first conceptual artists promises to reveal that the lights have been going on and off for a lot longer than you may have thought, not to mention that the Monty Python clan may have got some of their ideas from the likes of Keith Arnatt and Bruce McLean.
• Tate Britain, London, 12 April–29 August.
April 7, 2016
Dashing rogues? No, art thieves are boring goons
The recovery of yet another stolen picture by Edvard Munch is a reminder of just how seedy and unromantic art theft has become
Related: Stolen Edvard Munch artwork recovered after seven years
Art theft is ugly. People love to picture art thieves as dashing cat burglars who look like George Clooney and have a raffish charm that makes their crimes forgivable. In reality, they are mostly gangsters and professional criminals who have no feelings at all about the masterpieces they steal to use as collateral in underworld deals or with hopes of secret sales to billionaires. They are boring idiots. It is the art they prey on that is interesting and bohemian.
Continue reading...April 6, 2016
The digital Rembrandt: a new way to mock art, made by fools | Jonathan Jones
So an app has come up with a ‘Rembrandt’ portrait – and it’s a travesty of surface trickery. No computer art could match the emotional heft of a human original
I’ve been away for a few days and missed the April Fool stories in Friday’s papers – until I spotted the one about a team of Dutch “data analysts, developers, engineers and art historians” creating a new painting using digital technology: a virtual Rembrandt painted by a Rembrandt app. Hilarious! But wait, this was too late to be an April Fool’s joke. This is a real thing that is actually happening.
Rembrandt's art has meaning as a historical record of his encounters with the people, beliefs and anguishes of his time
Can a computer replicate the humanity of Rembrandt’s portrait of his lover? It would have to go to bed with her first
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