Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 186
August 4, 2015
Why the National Gallery strikes could turn me Tory
This gentle temple of art has become a battleground thanks to Mark Serwotka and the PCS union. But if they really cared about ordinary people, they’d be throwing their weight about elsewhere
Whose side are you on? I was hoping never to have to answer that question again. For so long, the big divisions of the British left were invisible. Not only are they here again, as blood red as they were back in the 1980s, but the demand to take sides won’t leave me alone even in the National Gallery.
Seriously. I’ve never voted anything but Labour in my life. Can’t you at least let me alone when I’m looking at Titian? I have to be a socialist in the museum now? Is it blacklegging to look at Leonardo?
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Modern hunting images are morally repugnant. Better to look away | Jonathan Jones
The pursuit of online outrage about killing big game is a new bloodsport that attracts self-consciously unpleasant rich people who take pleasure in the taboo
Everyone is complicit in a bloodsport when it comes to getting angry about images of hunters posing with slaughtered animals. That bloodsport is the pursuit of outrage, the greatest game of all in the digital age. It is so thrilling to close in on your first really horrifying image of wanton cruelty to animals, and after that you want another. The death of Cecil the lion has unleashed a riotous thirst for images of slaughter that is currently being satiated, or more likely aroused further, by a woman posing beside a “dangerous” giraffe she bravely killed.
Related: The hunter who killed Cecil the lion doesn’t deserve our empathy | Rose George
Continue reading...Edinburgh art festival review – a slight and silly sideshow
When the festival’s most thought-provoking work is by an 18th-century pastel painter, you can be sure theatre has left our art scene in the shallows
Is modern British theatre making the art world look silly? It was a question that nagged at me on a train pulling into Waverley station at the start of the Edinburgh art festival, as I brooded on the extraordinary episode at Manchester International Festival this summer when the artist Douglas Gordon ran riot with an axe after getting bad reviews for a theatre production. Gordon is a Turner prize winner and a serious artist, but as a theatre director he was laughed out of town. At a time when to visit the theatre is almost always to be amazed by the richness of contemporary stagecraft, has our art scene been left behind in the shallows, content with half-baked pseudo-theatrical stunts?
I am inclined to say yes after visiting this year’s Edinburgh art festival. What Edinburgh art festival? I am glad you ask. It’s been running for 12 years now, alongside the theatre and comedy that draws people to Edinburgh in August, but every year it seems more of a sideshow. This year’s commissions are both entertaining and slight, and full of art that invites cruel comparisons with all those intelligent plays and sidesplitting comics with which it will compete.
Continue reading...July 28, 2015
Aggressive, perverse and offensive: security checks at London museums are a farce
A cursory poke around bags picked at random is discriminatory, ineffectual – and plays right into the hands of terrorists
These are scary times. Terrorism threatens everyone. Or is the fear of it an illusion that does the actual terrorists’ work for them?
I would hazard a guess that London’s museums think the latter, while pretending to believe the former, because the security precautions they are taking are simultaneously ostentatious and risible. Just like those aggressive signs at airports saying “UK Border”, they seem far more of an attempt to look serious about security than to actually be serious.
Continue reading...July 27, 2015
Labour should win the Turner prize – it's a disastrous piece of performance art
The Labour party’s got controversy, provocation – and a remarkable ability to alienate people. If a housing estate can make the shortlist for the prestigious art prize, why not a political party?
The Labour Party may well be in line to win the Turner prize. If it goes on like this and descends into factions, it will have everything – bloody verbal violence, sensational controversy and most of all a stunning ability to alienate middle England. It could take the Turner out of its recent doldrums and back to its controversial glory days.
After all, this year a housing estate is on the Turner shortlist. Why not a political party next year?
Related: Turner prize 2015 shortlist: three women – and a housing estate
Continue reading...July 24, 2015
You're so vain: Facing History is the perfect exhibition for our selfie-obsessed world
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
We will never tire of portraits because they are an art of infinite possibility. A fascinating new exhibition shows how today’s artists are reinventing the genre – and proves that Rembrandt’s grimace and our selfie gurn are one and the same
Does portraiture belong to the past? Surely not. We like looking at people’s faces as much as ever. We all fancy ourselves as self-portraitists, gurning for a phone as Rembrandt once gurned in his selfie-like etchings. The human image is everywhere – in adverts, TV shows, politics. Is Jeremy Corbyn’s beard the source of his power? Did it all start going right for Osborne when he got a decent haircut?
Continue reading...July 23, 2015
The most unsayable truth: museums are not the NHS – they should charge us
Britain prides itself on its free museums, but they’re too idealistic – and besides, they hark back to the days when art was deemed second-rate culture
It may be time for museums in Britain to begin charging for entry. I do not say this lightly. The British – and it is distinctively British, with few equivalents elsewhere – belief that all museums should be free is a remarkable piece of idealism. It means that any of us can walk into our local gallery whenever we like and look at a Turner or even a Leonardo for nothing.
Sometimes you have to think the unthinkable. If we want museums to prosper and thrive in a harsh economic climate with central government talking about 40% cuts, an entrance fee may be the best way forward.
Continue reading...July 21, 2015
Can New York's Climate Museum save the planet?
It may well be able to – but it can’t do it alone. Museums around the world must stop dumbing down science and start putting education before entertainment
Can a museum help to save the planet? Is it possible to promote solutions to the human-caused warming of global climates through interactive displays, 3D movies, a gift shop and all the other methods of the modern museum?
That’s what the Climate Museum Launch Project hopes. This week, the Board of Regents of New York State gave it a five-year provisional charter to create a climate museum in New York City. Soon, tourists could be supplementing trips to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum with a troubling, or perhaps inspiring, visit to a museum full of climate-related exhibits. The plan is to focus on “solutions”, reports the New York Times. A design for the building has even been proposed by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson.
Continue reading...July 20, 2015
Mick Fanning’s shark escape mesmerised me – just as Jaws once did | Jonathan Jones
The giant fin. The man in the water. It is an image to set pulses racing and make hearts leap out of mouths. In the words of a commentator who had to respond to the live television images of champion surfer Mick Fanning fending off a shark attack during the J-Bay Open in South Africa: “Holy shit … Excuse me.” The live coverage of the contest then cut away presumably to spare viewers the sight of blood spurting from the sea. But Fanning fought off the shark – apparently you really can deter them with a punch or two – and swam desperately to safety.
Related: Mick Fanning battles shark attack at surfing competition: 'I'm just tripping'
It is all the fault of Steven Spielberg. He recognised something perfect in the meeting of shark and camera and mind
Continue reading...July 19, 2015
The mysterious German fad for posing with a polar bear imitator
Jean-Marie Donat’s TeddyBär collection of surreal photographs from the mid-20th century proves it is still possible to discover genuine unearthliness in a vintage find
It could be a series of scenes from a novel dreamed up by Günter Grass. The author of The Tin Drum, The Flounder and other surreal stories of modern Germany would surely have seen the magic-realist poignancy of these bizarre images, found by Jean-Marie Donat, a French collector of photographs. Perhaps he could even help to explain why so many people in early and mid-20th-century Germany seem to have wanted to pose for their pictures with a polar bear.
In a Grass novel, we might follow the adventures of a polar-bear imitator as he puts on his hot, sweaty, furry white costume to appear beside a variety of Germans for their photographs. Here he is with a couple beside the Baltic sea. The man has taken off his top, but still wears long black trousers.
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