Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 167
March 11, 2016
Are there really only seven different types of beauty?
Extravagant, transgressive, elemental ... the Cooper Hewitt design museum in New York has taxonomised the indefinable – beauty. Is this wrong-headed scientific precision or the brave tackling of a taboo?
So now we know. Humanity’s Keatsian quest for the true meaning of beauty is effectively over, the subject sussed once and for all. It’s fully understood, in the same way particle physics fell into place when the Higgs boson was proven to exist. What makes you beautiful, asked the boy band. New York’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum not only knows the answer but, like a medieval scholar identifying seven kinds of angel, has specified beauty’s seven varieties.
To be fair to the Cooper Hewitt, it has done something brave here. The museum’s newly opened Design Triennial takes the elusive idea of “beauty” as its theme – a topic contemporary criticism too often shies away from. The celebration of beauty is seen as bourgeois, safe or – when it comes to human society – oppressive, in its association with rigid norms few of us can live up to. In art, it can be seen as premodern and regressive. Today’s art often aspires to be something more than beautiful – serious, critical, radical or “disturbing”.
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March 9, 2016
Wanted, dead or alive: do statues always leave our hearts stone cold?
The row over the Rhodes statue in Oxford reveals the superstitious way we view sculpted figures – more alive to us than the campaigners care to admit
Campaigners calling for an Oxford University statue to be toppled have achieved the uncanny. They have brought the 19th-century imperialist Cecil Rhodes back to life. His dark spirit now inhabits his statue at Oriel College as if its stone were flesh and blood. An object has become a living entity through the power of rage.
I once saw something similar happen in Sicily, where the city of Trapani has a statue of the Virgin Mary in its cathedral that comes to life once a year and miraculously moves through the streets. It has some assistance, carried at the head of a long procession to the raucous sound of a brass band. But the effect is mystical and wondrous; the statue really seems to “live” for a night.
Related: Is a Queen Victoria statue offensive? It’s about time we debated our colonial past | Owen Jones
Continue reading...March 8, 2016
In the Age of Giorgione review – defiant, forgotten face of Renaissance art
Royal Academy of Arts, London
Giorgione’s reputation was eclipsed by Titian, but this early avant garde icon revolutionised the Renaissance with his raw portrayals of human weakness
The most shocking work of art on show in London right now is a painting that’s more than 500 years old.
A woman poses behind a stone parapet in golden Venetian light. She points at herself. In her hand is a banner that reads “Col Tempo” – with time. Her clothes are ragged and so is she. Time has cut lines into her face and turned her skin to crumpled paper. She opens her mouth to reveal worn stumps of teeth as she looks back at you with grim knowledge. Dry grey threads of hair complete the portrait of decay.
Related: Who painted the enigmatic Giustiniani Portrait? You decide
Continue reading...March 7, 2016
Fit for McQueen? London's big three museums exhibit Victorian era values
London’s V&A, Natural History Museum and Science Museum fulfil the visions of their founders in fine style. But the Victorians valued regional museums too
It is a stunning 21st-century success story: South Kensington’s museums quarter welcomed more visitors in 2015 than the city of Venice. No wonder. Between them, its three venues – the Victoria and Albert Museum, Natural History Museum and Science Museum, connected by a pedestrian underpass from South Kensington tube – house everything from dinosaurs to Alexander McQueen dresses, and mix up art, science and technology in a truly contemporary way.
Related: Three London museums totalled more visitors than Venice in 2015
Related: Museums are now part of Britain's pernicious north-south divide
Continue reading...March 5, 2016
For sale: Bill Koch’s $80m Aspen ranch, the wild west made very comfortable
Tycoon’s Colorado estate epitomises what’s happened to the American dream: a place where once anyone might stake a claim, but now you must be a billionaire
Peering closely at the glossy sales pictures of billionaire business tycoon Bill Koch’s $80m Aspen ranch I have, sadly, not been able to spot his treasured photograph of Billy the Kid among the romantic landscapes, cowboy paintings and other nostalgic American works of art in his sprawling Colorado compound.
The billionaire industrialist bought the picture of the infamous outlaw for $2.3m at a Denver auction in 2011. At that time it was the only authenticated photograph of Billy the Kid in existence; another, more contentious one has surfaced since.
Continue reading...March 4, 2016
Giorgione the tragic lover and Sarah Lucas's plaster parts – the week in art
The Royal Academy celebrates a Renaissance great, Patti Smith opens up about photography, plus let’s all move to Palm Springs – all in your weekly art dispatch
In the Age of Giorgione
The Renaissance artist Giorgione was a lutist, a lover and a tragic hero. He played his lute under Venetian balconies and spent his nights in Venetian bedrooms until he caught the plague from one of his many lovers. That’s the story told by Vasari in The Lives of the Artists, published in 1550, which made Giorgione one of the most glamorous figures in art. It helped that his paintings are so softly sensual. Then the modern scientific art scholars came along. One Giorgione after another got reattributed, often to Titian. Today, he is just the ghost of a great artist. Can this exhibition restore him to his rightful place?
• Royal Academy of Arts, London, 12 March-5 June.
Damien Hirst and Picasso: coming soon to a National Gallery near you?
Gabriele Finaldi is right. The Tate shouldn’t have exclusive access to 20th-century art. It’s time to end these closed-minded historical art wars
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, is arguably the world’s greatest gallery. It is definitely the most complete. You can look at art by El Greco and Rembrandt and then, for comparison, see paintings by Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns. You can admire ancient Egyptian architecture and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, medieval armour and modern photography.
This open-minded collection of world art has no equivalent in the UK, where big museums are more specialised. The British Museum, National Gallery and Tate have different “areas”, as if they are pedantic scholars fussing over little intellectual empires. Tate even divides its central collection into two, with Tate Modern covering a different remit from Tate Britain. Not to mention its sister galleries in Liverpool and St Ives. Only that visionary 19th-century creation the V&A has some of the Met’s expansiveness.
Of all the arguments you can have about art, the ones 'I hate modern art' or 'old art is boring' are the most closed off
Related: Floating Yodas aren't art, but don't kick them to the kerb, National Gallery
Continue reading...March 3, 2016
Warhol demonised Nixon. Heartfield took on Hitler. Where is Trump's artistic mauling?
The best political art is always viciously negative. And the monsterly qualities of Donald Trump are crying out for some hard-hitting mockery. So where are the likes of Chuck Close and Jeff Koons?
One of my all-time favourite works of political art is a demonic photograph of Richard Nixon, made by Andy Warhol in 1972. Nixon, who was running against the Democrat George McGovern, has been turned a sickly shade of blueish green, made worse by a background of lurid orange. Scrawled underneath, in capitals, is the message: “Vote McGovern.”
I think of this wonderfully understated – and prophetic – piece of propaganda whenever I see Donald Trump. The seemingly inevitable prospect of Trump becoming the Republican candidate is terrifying. But it does at least offer the prospect of some angry, hard-hitting art.
Continue reading...March 2, 2016
Botticelli Reimagined review – Venus in the gutter
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
By submerging Botticelli and his Venus in the trashy pool of pop and tourist culture they have inspired, this landmark show elevates them both
A Dolce and Gabbana dress covered with prints of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, a clip of Uma Thurman emerging from a shell in The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, graffiti art, Bulgari, a golden Italian racing car wheel that quotes a Botticelli brooch. I have wandered into some wonderland suspended between beauty and kitsch where the Renaissance has morphed into trashy pop culture.
One version of The Birth of Venus, by Vik Muniz, is literally made of trash, an assemblage of junk shaped into Botticelli’s classical composition, as if it had taken shape in the street. It is glorious. Truthfully, I have never seen an exhibition that so courageously captures what is magical about Italian Renaissance art. The magic and the mystery is precisely the ability to persist in this mad mix of modern reproduction, imitation, quotation and – let’s be clear – degradation, yet still come out on top. The world’s most beautiful and timeless works of art are also its biggest cliches and most absurd cultural phenomena.
Related: Beauty reimagined: 500 years of Botticelli
Continue reading...March 1, 2016
What do you see in this picture? I glimpse the darkness of European fears | Jonathan Jones
It is only when you notice the railway lines that all the historical echoes converge. On a train line between Greece and Macedonia, where a gate protected by barbed wire has been set up to keep migrants on the Greek side of the border, men are pulling down the defences. They’ve already weakened the gate with battering rams. As they make the final assault with bare hands, a crowd pushes and yells behind them, desperate to run along those railway lines, deeper into Europe.
The sky is white and remorseless. They are all wrapped up warm against a lingering winter. Photographers jostle among the crowd, for this is news. Another day. Another assault on a European border. Good pictures, like the one above , have been splashed across the press. It is full of furious humanity and a deep enigma. Who are these people and what do they want?
Related: UK must emulate Kindertransport to aid refugee crisis, says Lord Sacks
Related: Joseph Beuys, Tate Modern, London
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