Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 185
August 12, 2015
Why didn’t people smile in old photos? You asked Google – and here’s the answer | Jonathan Jones
As people asking Google this question have accurately observed, smiles are grimly absent from early photographs. Portraiture was at the heart of photography’s appeal from its very invention. In 1852, for instance, a girl posed for her Daguerreotype, her head slightly turned, giving the lens a steady, confident, unsmiling look. She is preserved forever as a very serious girl indeed.
Related: RIP the selfie: when Prince Harry calls time on a craze, you know it's well and truly dead
Today, we take so many smiling snaps the idea of anyone finding true depth and poetry in most of them is absurd.
Related: How selfies became a global phenomenon
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August 11, 2015
The 200-year-old painting that puts Europe's fear of migrants to shame
In 1819, people were outraged by the Raft of the Medusa’s depiction of migrants abandoned at sea. Today, most people ignore those dying to cross borders, the genocidal tragedy of our time. Racism is the only explanation
Nearly 200 years ago, Théodore Géricault painted a masterpiece of pity that puts modern Europe to shame.
The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19) is one of the most startling and powerful paintings in the world. It is also a call for compassion, humanity and common decency. Striking in reproduction, it is truly harrowing in real life, all 7x5 metres of it, looming over you in the Louvre. Darkness is literally eating up this painting; a deathly shadow seems to suck you into it. There is a black hole of horror at its heart.
Related: 10 truths about Europe’s migrant crisis
Related: On immigration, the language of genocide has entered the mainstream | Suzanne Moore
Related: Migrant life in Calais' Jungle refugee camp - a photo essay
Continue reading...August 10, 2015
We are all Spock: the Vulcan lives on in Captain Kirk's art
William Shatner has crowdsourced the ultimate Vulcan salute – a portrait of Leonard Nimoy made up of Trekkie selfies – and it’s actually pretty good
William Shatner’s portrait of Leonard Nimoy composed of a mosaic of selfies taken by fans is … actually quite good. As a piece of pop art in the tradition of Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits, it is touching and vivid. It is a moving homage to Spock and his relationship with his fans.
Shatner asked his Twitter followers to send him selfies in which they gave the Vulcan salute, the famous greeting associated with Leonard Nimoy’s pointy-eared alien character in Star Trek. He did not say what it was for. The images have all been put together in a huge mosaic to create a picture of Nimoy himself, as Spock, making the Vulcan salute.
Continue reading...August 9, 2015
Gone in a flash - watching the Tour de France spectators
Photographer Laurent Cipriani’s eerie images of fans at the world’s most famous cycling race capture a surreal sense of place and time
They are the people of France and they look isolated – and, more often than not, a bit unhappy.
France is a big country and Laurent Cipriani’s photographs of spectators at the Tour de France capture its scale. People in these pictures do not watch the legendary race in crowds. Instead they turn up in dribs and drabs when it passes by their homes or through their towns.
Continue reading...August 8, 2015
The Bodleian treasures online – in pictures
Oxford’s Bodleian Museum has digitised its archive of rarely-seen book illustrations. Here we show highlights of the collection, chosen by Jonathan Jones
Read Jonathan Jones on illumination for all here Continue reading...Oxford’s online Bodleian archive: illumination for all
• Click here to see a gallery of images from the new Bodleian online
I’ve got a secret vice. I love to visit rare book rooms and leaf through the pages of 16th-century traveller’s tales or 15th-century editions of Petrarch with their brilliantly coloured pictures. Once, I even found a design by Botticelli in a religious tract in the British Library.
This is not actually as criminal or difficult as it sounds. I was researching a book at the time and all the yellow-leafed volumes whose pictures I pored over in the rare books room at St Pancras were more or less relevant to it. Anyone with a British Library pass can do the same. But it raises the question of what great libraries are for: is the research they make possible just for PhD students assembling demographic data on medieval Norfolk or should the rich, aesthetic delights of illuminated manuscripts, 18th-century caricatures and scientific illustrations be available for us all to enjoy as art?
Continue reading...Labour centrists like me aren’t cynics: we’re the truly ethical wing of the left | Jonathan Jones
What some people are pleased to call “hope” ended for me in a Moscow taxi in the early 1990s. I was in the front and reached for my seatbelt, but the driver stopped me because seatbelts were just another bit of unmourned communist authoritarianism. Hurtling through Moscow in that rickety car I suddenly understood the incredible desire for freedom that had recently smashed the Berlin Wall.
I was witnessing the death of a monstrous lie in which I had somehow, through a mixture of idealism, anger, alienation and intellectual pride, managed to implicate myself. Not long before the Berlin Wall was overwhelmed, I was invited to join the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the Cambridge branch of Sainsburys. I said yes. It was the culmination of my student years as a serious and committed Marxist.
Karl Marx was a gentle man, but his ideas would lead to human suffering almost unequalled in the history of the world
Marxist ideas live again in some spectral form in Jeremy Corbyn’s runaway campaign
Continue reading...August 7, 2015
Is America's greatest art heist about to be solved?
There’s no romanticising the $500m Stewart Gardner Museum robbery of 1990. It was an attack on world culture. Could new footage of the robbers casing the joint help retrieve the masterpieces?
There’s new hope that the biggest art heist in American history may soon be solved. A new investigator on the case has found a video of a mysterious happening at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, just 24 hours before thieves walked in and took more than $500m worth of masterpieces.
Police have released the video, which looks like it may well show a rehearsal of the robbery. If so, this would open up new lines of investigation – from the mysterious visitor and his car, to the role of the guard both that night and the next.
Related: New Gardner museum video may show thieves 24 hours before art heist
Continue reading...August 6, 2015
Thumbs down! Why it's a disaster to restore the Colosseum
Giving this noble ruin a brand new floor will turn the ancient Rome monument into a bad taste film set for idiotic tourists
Italy is going to rebuild the Colosseum, the most renowned of all ancient Rome’s monuments. Once again, emperors will watch from the royal box as gladiators fight to the death and Christians are thrown to the lions.
Perhaps not quite. But Rome really is giving the arena a new floor at a cost of more than €18m. Italy’s Culture Minister Dario Franceschini calls the reflooring “a promise kept”.
Continue reading...August 5, 2015
The scars of America: why a nude artist is taking a stand at slavery sites
Nona Faustine posing naked in the streets of New York is a chilling reminder of the vulnerability of the slaves sold there – and the violence against humanity that still troubles the nation today
There are many ways to remember slavery: You can leave tributes, as pilgrims do, at the slavers’ forts in west Africa, or tell the stories of slaves’ lives in books and on screen. Or, like artist Nona Faustine, you can pose naked but for a pair of white shoes at places around New York where slaves were once sold.
There are no more auction blocks, but the ghosts remain for Faustine at sites such as Wall Street where, between Water and Pearl Streets, a slave market operated in the 18th century. It is a chilling thought. But is that memory appropriately awakened by an artist standing nude on a box in the middle of the street?
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