Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 182
September 15, 2015
The secret life of paintings: how my art collection went walkies
Paintings are living things, and cohabiting with one – especially one of Cain and Abel – is complex. Now my art collection is joining an exhibition. Am I ready to let it leave home?
Ever looked at the labels on artworks in an exhibition where it says “on loan from a private collection” or simply “private collection”, and wondered who the owner is, how they came to have it, what happens in the world of art ownership?
Well, visitors to Sacrifice, an exhibition of art, artefacts and stories on the subject that opens at the Jewish Museum in London this week, will see a painting “from a private collection” whose actual owner is … me.
Related: Curios and curiouser: the weird and wonderful stuff that artists collect
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September 14, 2015
The Tories’ Corbyn attack video is absurd, paranoid and nasty – and will work | Jonathan Jones
It may belong with the Conservatives’ Demon Eyes poster in the museum of crap propaganda: but portraying Corbyn as an extremist feeling sorry for Bin Laden is a smear with legs
You might almost conclude that the Conservatives are terrified of Jeremy Corbyn. The strident scare movie released by the Tories today does not exactly suggest a governing party that thinks the new leader of the opposition is a joke, a reincarnation of Michael Foot, or an unelectable far-left throwback. Was this always the plan, to go so ludicrously ballistic years ahead of the next general election, or has the scale of Corbyn’s support in the Labour movement and the novelty of his no-frills personality and raw unplasticated ideas thrown Tory spinmeisters into a panic?
It is the stuff of nightmares. Jeremy Corbyn, a threat to national security! The Labour party, a threat to national security! The rhetoric in the video is ramped up massively, the footage of Corbyn edited melodramatically and captioned too aggressively. It is easy to mock and makes the Conservative party look like it is on the back foot, unsure how to take on a new kind of Labour leader. We are back to Demon Eyes, the poster that absurdly tried to demonise Tony Blair back in 1997.
Related: Tory theme of Corbyn's 'threat to national security' draws criticism
All this is very reassuring for Corbyn’s new movement, until you imagine yourself as another kind of viewer
Continue reading...September 11, 2015
Allen Ginsberg and a vandalised vagina – the week in art
Ai Weiwei opens up about Chinese censorship and his friend the beat poet, as we reveal the hottest shows of the autumn. Plus Anish Kapoor’s ‘queen’s vagina’ sculpture has been vandalised – and he’s being taken to court for it
Drawing in Silver and Gold: The art of silverpoint drawing has something alchemical about it that results in drawings of ethereal beauty. This is a seductive and satisfying encounter with truly great art, from Leonardo da Vinci’s head of a war-hardened warrior to Albrecht Durer’s portrait of a troubled youth to works by Jasper Johns and Bruce Nauman. Superb stuff.
British Museum, London WC1B until 6 December
I've read Pratchett now: it's more entertainment than art
My dismissal of the literary merits of the late Terry Pratchett raised hackles among fans. Now I am better read, and can admire his clever wordplay. But I still believe the best prose lives in the real world
When it comes to reading fiction, we are all fans. We read and reread the authors we love, and with whom we may have fallen in love decades ago. The process that connects a reader and an author is as mysterious as the spark that brings two people together – and the passions are as intense.
One of my proudest moments was when I looked at the British paperback edition of Philip Roth’s novel Nemesis and saw praise from my Guardian art blog quoted on its cover: “A mesmerically imagined work of realism...” I have been addicted to Roth for decades. Having my homage printed on one of his books was a fan’s fantasy come true.
Continue reading...September 10, 2015
Life's a drug: why pharmaceutical art is so addictive
Machine-guns made of painkillers, ecstasy pill murals ... artists from Damien Hirst to Chemical X make pharma art to expose our numb, drug-addled age
We live in a chemical world, where everything from pain to pleasure to survival itself can be shaped by legal and illegal drugs. Many people live on a daily cocktail of prescribed pharmaceuticals, and many more take unprescribed ones at the weekend. No wonder so many artists make pharma art. Life in the west is no longer raw even at the rawest times, but muffled by medicine. Even death is mediated by chemicals: many of us will pass away in a drugged blur.
Continue reading...September 9, 2015
The Queen becomes a street art pin-up
With his rampantly patriotic and 100% unofficial portrait of Her Maj, street artist Pegasus shows how deadly dull most official portraits of Britain’s longest reigning monarch are
There is a new official portrait of the Queen to celebrate her becoming the longest reigning British monarch, but the photograph by Mary McCartney is not nearly as striking as the unofficial portrait a London street artist has created.
Pegasus really loves the Queen – and not all that platonically. In his fantasy painting on a bar door in Islington, a youthful image of the Queen’s face is transposed on to a long-legged body. Her bum is bare as she poses in high heels. The sexy monarch is standing in front of a union flag with the word HISTORY scrawled across it.
Continue reading...September 8, 2015
Anish Kapoor must reconsider – Dirty Corner should be cleaned | Jonathan Jones
Anish Kapoor, it turns out, is not only a brilliant artist but a brave one. Faced with an antisemitic attack on his open-air sculpture Dirty Corner, he has chosen to defiantly leave the ugly, vicious daubings as they are, to let his art bear the scars of contemporary Europe’s darkest impulses: a dirty corner indeed, stained by racism and ignorance.
It is the second time this sensual, suggestive work of art has been vandalised – and of course there’s a very laudable political logic in Kapoor’s decision to let the rancid markings stay. “The vandalised sculpture now looks like a graveyard,” he says, in explanation of his decision to let racism and intolerance “expose itself fully, in full view for all to see”.
Related: Anish Kapoor's 'queen's vagina' vandals and the rise of cultural fascism in France
His art bears the scars of Europe’s darkest impulses: a dirty corner indeed, stained by racism and ignorance
Continue reading...Drawing in Silver and Gold review – a stupendously rich gathering of great art
British Museum, London
Some of the finest drawings in history were done using silverpoint. A new exhibition is proof that this artform is ingenious, magical – and will stop you in your tracks
The equivalent of an iPad drawing app in Reformation Germany was a leather-bound sketchpad with its pages coated in paste. A thin metal stylus fitted snugly into a clasp on the spine of the book. Using this stylus, you could draw delicate sketches wherever you happened to be.
A surviving example of this clever artists’ technology is on display in the British Museum’s engrossing new exhibition. It belonged to the 16th-century painter Hans Baldung Grien, who is notorious for his perverse fantasy scenes of witches’ sabbaths. In his sketchpad, though, he drew faces and places and everyday life. It’s like looking into a visual diary drawn yesterday, but it is nearly 500 years old.
Continue reading...September 7, 2015
Art, design and architecture: what to see in autumn 2015
Ai Weiwei hits Britain, Turner goes to Glasgow, the Celts invade the British Museum – and Damien Hirst has a crack at curating with the opening of his own £25m gallery
From the stately dome of the US Capitol in Washington DC to the rugged concrete columns of a recently built cowshed in Somerset, the influence of Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio persists across centuries and continents, his lasting legacy often found in the most unlikely places. Organised by the Royal Institute of British Architects, which owns the vast majority of Palladio’s surviving drawings, this exhibition will shine a spotlight on how Palladian style began and proliferated, bringing together a fascinating range of models and pattern books that influenced the design of buildings from New Delhi to St Petersburg. Oliver Wainwright
Continue reading...September 5, 2015
Should Britain’s ‘worst building’ be demolished?
Building Design magazine last week awarded 20 Fenchurch Street – the Walkie Talkie building – its “Carbuncle Cup”.
Demolish this deranged building to create a firebreak that ends the inferno of towers
What we need now is less dynamite, less sound and fury, and a hard look at how we can do things better.
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