Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 178
October 27, 2015
Egypt: Faith After the Pharaohs review – a magical dig into the past
British Museum, London
With its miraculously preserved ancient objects – precious texts, gleeful art, children’s toys – Neil MacGregor’s last hurrah gets close to solving the mystery of religion itself
Neil MacGregor’s swansong as director of the British Museum is a brilliant challenge to the modern western belief in unbelief: the cosy assumption that all sensible people are secular rationalists now. It confronts our inability to cope with a world in which religion is still passionately, viscerally, sometimes murderously, alive.
Trying to understand North Africa or the Middle East without somehow going to the heart of faith is like trying to read a book in a language you don’t understand. This exhibition begins with books that are indeed written in languages I don’t understand: Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. They are some of the most precious religious manuscripts on Earth, laid side by side here,just as the communities they speak to have lived side by side in Egypt for millennia. A ninth/10th-century Jewish Bible, with bright abstract illuminations among the handwritten Hebrew letters, sits near the Codex Sinaiticus – the oldest complete Christian New Testament in the world, made at the Monastery of St Catherine in Sinai in the mid-fourth century AD (that is, under the Roman empire). Nearby is a gorgeous page from an eighth-century copy of the Qur’an, created a century after Egypt was conquered by Islam.
Continue reading...
Modern art is rubbish? Why mistaking artworks for trash proves their worth
Another exhibit has been bagged up and put in a bin by cleaners, but this common mistake shows just how radical contemporary art can be
Is modern art rubbish? The question hangs in the air like the stale smell of last night’s ashtray whenever art gallery cleaners stuff an installation into black sacks and leave it out for the bin men.
It has happened to Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and other contemporary artists, and now it has happened to Milan’s Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari, whose installation Where Shall We Go Dancing Tonight? was swept away in its entirety by cleaners at the Museion in Bolzano, northern Italy.
Continue reading...October 26, 2015
Ai Weiwei has not been censored: Lego is a toy, not a force for evil
The dissident artist should know better than to call Lego’s refusal to sell him bricks censorship. And what are these ‘questionable values’ he’s talking about?
The dissident artist Ai Weiwei has finally found a target, other than the Chinese government, worthy of his scorn. It is that notorious corporate source of evil … Lego.
Yes. The artist who criticises China’s suppression of free speech and who has campaigned for important causes such as justice for the victims of the 2008 Sichuan province earthquake, has turned his ire on the Danish toymaker.
Related: Artist Ai Weiwei vows to accept offers of Lego from around the world
Continue reading...October 23, 2015
Space art, Spain's last miners and a Hieronymus Bosch miracle – the week in art
Haunting portraits from space and the coal face, plus a Bosch exhibition 500 years in the making – all in your weekly dispatch
Egypt: Faith after the Pharaohs
The rich and varied religions of Egypt are explored in a timely reminder of a complex cultural history.
• British Museum, London, from 29 October until 7 February 2016
October 21, 2015
Punk with a paintbrush: how Turner sunk the Empire
JMW Turner’s Battle of Trafalgar celebrates a great British victory 210 years ago today … but really it’s a mutiny, revealing a gigantic act of unpatriotic rebellion
The sea broils with war. Sails hover like veils above the dead and dying. Is this the Victory or defeat?
JMW Turner’s painting The Battle of Trafalgar 21 October 1805 is well worth looking at on Trafalgar Day, 210 years after Nelson’s stunning defeat of the French and Spanish fleets that changed the course of the Napoleonic wars and established a British naval supremacy that lasted into modern times.
Continue reading...Jeremy Corbyn’s white-tie get-up is straight outta Downton | Jonathan Jones
The Labour leader’s appearance at the Buckingham Palace banquet in honour of Xi Jinping is not so much conformist as surreal – and projects an image of virtue
Jeremy Corbyn in white tie looks like a character straight out of the Edwardian age. It’s the white beard that does it. Pictured walking smartly past a row of oil paintings at last night’s Buckingham Palace banquet for China’s president, Xi Jinping, Corbyn resembles a figure from a painting by John Singer Sargent, the supremely stylish recorder of high society before the first world war. Who is this distinguished and wiry man resplendent in court dress? Is it Bulstrode of the Foreign Office who organised that jolly standoff with the Kaiser in east Africa? Or diamond magnate Edgar Sponge?
Related: Who is Jeremy Corbyn? Chinese daily analyses Xi Jinping meeting with Labour leader
Related: Corbyn has 'cordial' exchange with Xi over China's rights record
Continue reading...October 20, 2015
Jean-Etienne Liotard review – a joyous time machine back to the Enlightenment
Royal Academy, London
This subtly radical artist put rarely seen smiles on the faces of his princesses and aristocrats, creating a lace-framed snapshot of the Enlightenment era
Some artists express their age so perfectly that looking at their work is like travelling in a time machine. Jean-Etienne Liotard is one of those redeemers of lost time. His art is a lace-framed photograph of the Enlightenment.
If you think the 18th century was all wigs, toffs and hangings, the subtle radicalism of Liotard’s art should change your mind. The 1700s were an age of revolution in life and thought. The violent climax of that revolution is foreseen here, eerily, in a portrait of the future Queen Marie Antoinette of France when she was a seven-year-old Austrian princess. She looks assured and confident. She will die at the guillotine.
Continue reading...Henge benefits: why Bill Bryson is wrong about Avebury
With his complaints about the cash, the parking and the labyrinthine layout, Bryson is opening the way for the Disneyfication of Avebury’s electric mysteries
Writer Bill Bryson has complained that he was fleeced at Avebury stone circle, shelling out £32 in the famous Wiltshire village before he even saw the stones – and without even getting a cup of tea for his cash. That is quite an achievement, since the Avebury stone circle has no admission charge. It costs nothing to walk around the high earth banks that enfold the village, to stand below sinister sarsen stones that resemble frozen giants, or walk to nearby Silbury Hill and see the closest thing neolithic Britons ever built to an Egyptian pyramid.
Avebury is a mystical wonderland. Bryson seems to have missed the point. He confesses in his new book The Road to Little Dribbling that he felt “grumpy” after paying for parking, then going to the National Trust’s ticket-charging properties in the village before he even found the stones. “The size and complexity of Avebury and the fact that a village stands in its midst,” he says, “make it awfully hard to get your bearings, and the National Trust does precious little to help.”
Continue reading...October 19, 2015
Picasso in a space suit: the astronaut artist orbiting Earth
Photographs taken by astronaut Scott Kelly from the International Space Station are beautiful – but could a robot do better?
What makes astronaut Scott Kelly’s photographs so special? Kelly, the commander of the International Space Station, has just become the US astronaut who has spent the longest time in space. Up there sitting in a tin can far above the earth, his hobby is taking photographs of the incredible planet below him – and it’s more than a hobby. Kelly calls his pictures “Earth art”. Is that right? He may be a brave astronaut, but is he an artist?
Continue reading...October 16, 2015
Tate Modern's Turbine Hall of fame: the best and worst artworks so far
As Tate Modern reveals its latest Turbine Hall blockbuster, Jonathan Jones gives his verdict on which installations have worked best so far, and which have failed to rise to the enormous challenge
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
