Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 183
September 1, 2015
Put yourself in the picture: share your artworks about art
We’re kicking off an A to Z of Readers’ Art with the assignment A for ... Art. Painters from Velázquez to Vermeer have famously created self-referential works. Now it’s your chance
One of art’s great themes is ... art. Just as novelists have been writing about novels ever since Cervantes invented Don Quixote, artists have been depicting art itself ever since... well, perhaps you know the first example. In his famously complex masterpiece Las Meninas, the 17th-century artist Velázquez portrays himself at the easel in the act of portraying the king and queen who can be seen in a mirror. Vermeer similarly tries to represent the nature of art itself of his picture The Art of Painting.
Picasso too explores the mysteries of art in a series of paintings on the theme of The Studio (L’Atelier). This is actually a very old subject indeed. Renaissance artists often painted Saint Luke portraying the Virgin, taking it as an opportunity to record the painter’s craft.
Related: The A to Z of Readers' Art: our new project for you
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August 31, 2015
Get real. Terry Pratchett is not a literary genius
Life is too short to waste on ordinary potboilers – and our obsession with mediocre writers is a very disturbing cultural phenomenon
It does not matter to me if Terry Pratchett’s final novel is a worthy epitaph or not, or if he wanted it to be pulped by a steamroller. I have never read a single one of his books and I never plan to. Life’s too short.
No offence, but Pratchett is so low on my list of books to read before I die that I would have to live a million years before getting round to him. I did flick through a book by him in a shop, to see what the fuss is about, but the prose seemed very ordinary.
Related: The Shepherd’s Crown review – Terry Pratchett’s farewell to Discworld
Continue reading...August 28, 2015
Sex, death and Rodin: the devilish bronze rediscovered after 100 years
Rodin’s long-lost statue of a man locked in a fight with a serpent is an orgy of desire and terror and a slithering icon of his provocative genius
Auguste Rodin made sculpture modern by wrestling with its past. His art is a tangled sensual battle of old and new in which Michelangelo and the classical nude give birth to expressionism, surrealism and even dadaism.
A “lost” work by Rodin that has just resurfaced in Switzerland after a century exemplifies how passionately he embraced art’s noblest traditions – and how boldly he made them new.
Continue reading...August 27, 2015
The Virginia shooting's 'reality show' paradox: people on TV don't seem real | Jonathan Jones
The on-air death of a news anchor is therefore something that can be replayed on screens or printed in newspapers with impunity
Related: Virginia shootings: we learn nothing from seeing murder in real time | Archie Bland
Vester Flanagan’s video of his own murderous shooting of Alison Parker and Adam Ward shows a brutal double killing from the shooter’s point of view. While such a sick stunt echoes the horror film Peeping Tom by British director Michael Powell, in which a cameraman films his murders, this is not fiction. It is reality - or the closest modern life gets to reality.
Related: Gun control is political. So is refusing to address the politics of gun violence | Scott Lemieux
Related: The blasé acceptance that you might get shot is a fact of American life | Megan Carpentier
Continue reading...Botticelli Reimagined exhibition coming to V&A after opening in Berlin
London show will feature modern artwork, fashion, film and music inspired by the Renaissance artist, as well as large collection of original Botticelli paintings
Maybe Helen of Troy’s beauty launched a thousand ships but Sandro Botticelli’s paintings of Venus, Pallas Athena, Simonetta Vespucci and other women, both real and mythical, have inspired countless imitations that will form a constellation of ideal and profane love in Botticelli Reimagined, a blockbuster show that opens at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin next month before coming to the V&A in the spring.
From David LaChapelle’s opulently kitsch 2009 photowork Rebirth of Venus, to a Botticelli-themed dress by Dolce and Gabbana that Lady Gaga wore for her Artpop tour, to a clip of Ursula Andress emerging like Botticelli’s Venus from the waves in the 1962 Bond film Dr No, this bold exploration of a great artist’s afterlives trawls far and wide through popular culture.
August 26, 2015
1997 or bust: how Tony Blair and Damien Hirst let us all down
New Labour’s landslide victory and Charles Saatchi’s YBA show promised a new Britain that was keen to shove conservatism aside. What’s happened since is awe-inspiring and angering
Two events changed the face of Britain in 1997. One was the landslide victory for New Labour in the general election on 1 May. The other was Sensation: Young British Artists, an exhibition from the Saatchi Gallery that opened in September at the Royal Academy in London.
To a nation basking in Tony Blair’s (long) honeymoon with the electorate, the Saatchi show seemed an image of a new Britain that was shoving conservatism aside. Here was new art for a new age, from Gavin Turk’s self-portrait as Sid Vicious to Tracey Emin’s tent. Yet just as New Labour was dominated by Blair’s personality, Sensation was dominated by Damien Hirst, whose dead animals in vitrines were the most outrageous and the most serious art in the entire show.
Related: In Dismaland, Banksy has created something truly depressing
Continue reading...August 25, 2015
The bullfighter activist was a woman breaking up a male fantasy | Jonathan Jones
She bends down to comfort the dying bull. She holds its horns in a loving and tender farewell to a creature slaughtered for sport. As the matador in his finery looks on helplessly at his moment of triumph being spoiled, officials try to pull animal rights activist Virginia Ruiz away from the beast to whom she brings solidarity and compassion. Did the beast know? Did this moment of mercy make a difference to it? And how long can Spain keep using bulls as sacrificial victims in archaic sports and festivals?
This dramatic protest in the bullring was one more incident during a summer of no fewer than 10 fatalities in the bull-running events that are popular in many Spanish towns. Bulls have been mythified in many cultures since the stone age. They appear in cave paintings as potent, supernatural horned beings. During the Minoan civilisation in Crete, young men leaped over bulls as part of a game that may also have been a religious ritual. This Minoan obsession with bulls is remembered in the Greek myth of the Minotaur, the half-bull, half-human monster that lived beneath the royal palace.
Nobody explored the mythology of bulls and bullfighting in more detail than Picasso. To him, it was tragedy
'Spain: Activist Jumps into Bullfighting Ring to Comfort Dying Bull' Amazingly brave: https://t.co/w4Rx6tF5qX pic.twitter.com/ud9s3U0szn
Related: Man killed during bull run in Spain pushes death toll to 10 so far for year
Continue reading...Oops, butter fingers! I live in ultimate fear of ruining a million-pound painting
I feel for the Taiwanese klutz who slipped and punched a hole in a 17th-century painting. It’s only a matter of time before my own slapstick moment
I am clumsy and prone to spilling drinks, tripping over and other suchlike slapstick incidents. So I have a lot of sympathy for the Taiwanese boy who tripped over in an art show and accidentally put his fist through a 17th-century canvas.
Related: Boy trips in museum and punches hole through million-dollar painting
Continue reading...August 21, 2015
In Dismaland, Banksy has created something truly depressing
The artist’s ‘Bemusement Park’ claims to be making you think, but as an actual experience it is thin, threadbare and, to be honest, quite boring
This place is unreal. A dilapidated pub, desperate-looking big wheel and grim promenade perfectly express the melancholy of the British seaside. But that’s just Weston-super-Mare on a cloudy morning. Dismaland is even stranger. Or so I hope, as I join the very first visitors to Banksy’s “Bemusement Park” waiting to see what lies behind a miserably gothic sign on the battered facade of a decaying lido.
People have been waiting for hours in a queue that stretches far along the prom. A thousand free tickets have been given away to Weston-super-Mare residents for this first public day. All ages and subcultures, from punks to a man dressed entirely in union jacks, are waiting to have their bags searched.
Related: Banksy's Dismaland: 'a theme park unsuitable for children' – in pictures
Continue reading...August 20, 2015
Nicki Minaj and the ancient art of men having sex with statues
In a sordid tale of wax and lust, Nicki Minaj’s statue at Madame Tussauds has garnered unwanted attention from the public. The museum could have avoided this disaster if they’d learned more about those kinky, kinky ancients
Related: Madame Tussauds rethinks Nicki Minaj waxwork display over saucy fan photos
Madame Tussauds could have avoided catastrophe if only its staff knew their ancient history. The Las Vegas branch of the Tussauds waxwork empire has had to revise how it displays a statue of Nicki Minaj after visitors took sexually explicit photos of themselves engaging graphically with the figure, which poses on hands and knees wearing not very much. One male visitor seems to have posted a particularly offensive picture.
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