Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 184
August 19, 2015
Think Vladimir Putin looks like a Bond villain? It’s more serious than that | Jonathan Jones
Vladimir Putin has a way of looking almost like a clown to the wider world while sending out exactly the message he wants to his audience in Russia. Both appearances – the so nearly comical figure abroad and the national hero at home – serve him well as he continues in a project whose ultimate aim we can only guess at. Or try not to, if we want to get any sleep.
The Russian president’s latest stunt casts him as a daring undersea adventurer in the bubble-like capsule of a bathyscaphe about to descend to an ancient shipwreck at the bottom of the Black Sea. It’s another pose that lends itself both to sensation and ridicule. Melodramatically, hostile westerners might see an absurd resemblance to a Bond villain. Putin’s love of hi-tech has all the boy’s toy bravado of a blockbuster spy movie. Where’s he going – his undersea lair?
‘Imagine if Nicola Sturgeon posed in a bathyscaphe in the North Sea to prove the antiquity of Scottish fishing rights.'
Related: Putin on a show: Russian president feeds personality cult with minisub trip – in pictures
Continue reading...
August 18, 2015
The new Turner prize bus tours reek of tartan fetishism
By only showcasing Scottish art on the tour bus for the world’s biggest art prize, the Travelling Gallery is letting itself be corrupted by petty nationalism
Some brilliant Scottish artists have won the Turner prize. Brilliant English ones have as well, plus bad Scottish artists and bad English ones. It’s a truly British institution, a modern vindication of the political union in which we still live, for now.
So staging this autumn’s Turner prize in Glasgow is both a deserved recognition of Scotland’s strength in contemporary art and a subtle argument for its staying in Britain. For the Turner’s record mocks the idea that an English establishment suppresses Scottish creativity. Not only has Scotland won the Turner regularly – I cheered for Douglas Gordon in 1996, as a juror I voted for Richard Wright in 2009 and hated Duncan Campbell’s winning film in 2014 – but the prize has been a window that brought the Glasgow art scene to a wider world. It would be rubbish to say modern art has always been vastly popular in Scotland, or that artists such as Gordon had a huge home audience before they made it internationally. Rather, they succeeded as part of a British avant garde popularised above all by the very British Turner prize.
Continue reading...August 17, 2015
The yacht and the dinghy in the Aegean: a perfect allegory for the migrant crisis
Iranian migrants paddle a tiny dinghy from Turkey to the Greek island Kos, while a vast yacht passes by in a powerful photo that speaks volumes about the situation
It’s a picture of courage. A picture of the human capacity for hope and endurance.
But it is also a picture of cold disregard, sleek injustice, and a desperately unequal world.
Related: Kos migrants: 'They said they'd give us papers, then locked us in like a prison'
Continue reading...How Doctor Who saved my summer holiday
I’ve been a superfan since I was eight – I know the Doctor can save the universe. But would a rainswept Doctor Who Experience rescue my vacation?
It’s the summer of belief. The summer of hope.
No, thanks. I can’t believe in the born-again left – but then I don’t believe in much. I stopped believing in God a long time ago. Political solutions are only ever partial, temporary, and if they try to be final they become dangerous. The worst problems in the world are caused by people who think they have all the answers.
Continue reading...The Vatican's new philanthropy app could ruin everything
The last time wealthy art fans did a Vatican restoration, they nearly destroyed the Sistine Chapel. The new Vatican app is elitism 2.0 – and will only endanger more masterpieces
From the bankers and princely families of the Renaissance to Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III (well, OK, that was fiction), the Vatican has history with art patronage. It has a genius for getting money for art from the great and the good, not to mention the bad.
Now it is pioneering new ways of attracting money in the 21st century. The Vatican Museums have launched Patrum, an app designed to create a community of philanthropic supporters for the artistic treasures of the Vatican. It’s a kind of elite crowdfunding venture.
Continue reading...August 14, 2015
The Benedict Cumberbatch question: 'tis nobler in the mind or on the camera?
Alas, poor Sherlock. He, like Walter Benjamin before him, has got it wrong about revolutionary technology and works of art
Benedict Cumberbatch raised a fascinating, even philosophical, question when he begged fans not to corrupt a night out at the theatre by filming his performance of Hamlet. Standing at the stage door he mused on the destruction of memory and experience in the digital age, pleading with people not to ruin the moment but instead pay attention to “a live performance that you’ll remember, hopefully, in your minds and brains whether it’s good, bad or indifferent, rather than on your phones”.
His heartfelt protest against the abuse of technology will strike a chord with anyone who has felt baffled by today’s urge to photograph and film heightened cultural experiences as they happen, in a way that surely spoils the point of them. It certainly struck a chord with me. Cameras and cameraphones (is there any other kind of phone nowadays?) are the curse of the 21st-century museum. At any museum that allows photography you will see some visitors simply going around snapping one painting after another apparently without stopping to look at the work. Just taking a picture seems to satisfy them. What’s the attraction? Why would anyone do that? You can get postcards and guidebooks if you want a record. I feel like shaking them. Stop and look, dammit! Mr Cumberbatch has put it very well: a work of art, whether it is a painting or a play, should live in our minds, not on our phones.
Continue reading...
We don’t need the union jack on Team GB’s kit – it’s ugly and divisive
| Jonathan Jones
The trouble with the United Kingdom’s flag, when you come to think about it, is that it is really quite ugly. I have every sympathy for the designers who removed it from the British athletics team’s vests for the imminent World Athletics Championships in Beijing. Olympic long jump champion Greg Rutherford has complained that “it isn’t a British kit any more” because it hasn’t got the union flag, but the decision makes sense aesthetically. The new vest is an elegant flowing dance of red, white and blue – the flag’s colours, remember – and has Great Britain written on it in big letters. It just doesn’t have that jagged, explosive, aggressive flag.
Well this isn't right... Where's the Union Jack!?!? @BritAthletics (this is the kit for worlds) pic.twitter.com/RAVoi6yRex
Related: Design a Team GB athletics kit that isn't 'ridiculous' (with or without a union flag)
Continue reading...August 13, 2015
Sywork lets you watch artworks come alive online. It's unbearably boring
We would like to believe art is created in a passionate burst of inspiration, but, as a new website proves, the reality is like watching ... well, paint dry
The artist’s studio – it’s one of the great mysterious places. We visit the preserved studios of artists with awe and fascination, from Jackson Pollock’s little barn with its paint-spattered floor to Brancusi’s lair in Paris and Barbara Hepworth’s studio, where the artist died in an accident.
Now the mystery is over. Today, everything can be shared. Why should art be a secretive, private labour? Now it must be live online, in the eyes of the world, for everyone to see.
Continue reading...Anish Kapoor is right to be livid about China stealing his big Bean sculpture
A city in Zinjiang has a new public artwork that’s suspiciously similar to Kapoor’s Bean in Chicago – and the sculptor is incensed, though this is just the latest act of copycat culture in China. Are people in the west too precious about intellectual property rights?
There isn’t much room for ambiguity. It is clearly Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, the bulbous monument in Chicago known as the Bean, whose shiny metal surface reflects the sky in ever-changing ways.
Except this one is not in Chicago, and it is not by Kapoor. It has been built in the Xinjiang region of China in what appears to be an insouciant act of plagiarism.
Related: Seeing double: what China's copycat culture means for architecture
Continue reading...August 12, 2015
Why Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy selfie would turn Titian on
Kardashian’s selfie is a hymn to the female body that harks back to the liberating portrayals of ample women in Renaissance and baroque art – and proves that ours is the most misogynist age in history
Kim Kardashian reclaims the beauty of being pregnant in her latest impressive selfie. In soft light, she sports an even more curvaceous form than usual: even more contours to revel in.
It’s a hymn to the female body that would have been far more familiar in the Renaissance than today. Stomach bulges are so common in Renaissance nudes that historians argue over whether or not they represent pregnancy. Van Eyck’s Eve and Raphael’s La Fornarina can both be seen as pregnant – or not – and their stomachs are very much part of their sensuality.
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
