Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 187
July 17, 2015
Alice Anderson at the Wellcome Collection review – a weird, wired world
Wellcome Collection, London
From old TVs to obsolete telephones and even a staircase, Alice Anderson mummifies things in copper wire. It may sound banal – but it’s an art that gets some very curious and uncanny results
Their funeral wrappings glisten fierily in the spotlights that pick them out in a theatrically darkened space. All our yesterdays are here, the things we use and throw away, lost and found in spidery cocoons.
Alice Anderson wraps things in copper wire. It is a banal description of an art that gets some very curious and uncanny results.
Minion madness and bank robberies – the week in art
The daft yellow henchmen get their own Pantone colour, as Joe Gibbons gets a year in prison for robbing banks as performance art. Plus a Kickstarter for Ai Weiwei and the man who photographed only his wife – in your weekly dispatch
Out of Chaos
This exhibition, which celebrates 100 years of the Ben Uri art collection, surveys the story of Jewish émigré art in Britain since 1915.
• Somerset House, London, until 13 December.
July 15, 2015
Bank robbery as performance art? Why a thief may have made a masterpiece
In stealing $1,000 and calling it artwork, Joe Gibbons assaulted reality like a Dadaist poet – or The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin
Performance art is a kind of madness. Its greatest exponents in their greatest works often seem on the edge of some psychotic meltdown in which reality itself is exposed as a cosmic lunacy. Think of Chris Burden getting himself shot in the arm, or Vito Acconci masturbating under an art gallery floor. Or go right back to the origins of performance at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 when the Dadaist poet Hugo Ball babbled inchoately at the nighthawks of Zurich.
When you think of this history – and let’s not forget the riots deliberately induced by Futurist Evenings before the first world war – it seems reasonable to claim that not only was film-maker Joe Gibbons genuinely staging “performance art” when he robbed a New York City bank, as he claimed, but that it was some kind of masterpiece.
Continue reading...Down with Kickstarter! Where art is concerned, the crowd is an idiot
The Royal Academy’s crowdfunding campaign to install an Ai Weiwei artwork seems a good idea, right? Wrong. Crowds simply do not appreciate art
Crowdfunding is typical of our time, in that it is a universally acclaimed good thing that actually reveals many problems if you pause to think about it for a second or two.
Related: Royal Academy turns to crowdfunding to bring Ai Weiwei's trees to London
All the evidence of history tells us crowds are dangerous, irrational and colossally unwise
Continue reading...July 14, 2015
The Smithsonian should be ashamed of showing Bill Cosby's art collection
The Washington museum has released an extraordinary disclaimer about its current African and African American art show, as allegations against the comedian escalate – now why would it do that?
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art feels the need to explain something about its current exhibition, Conversations: African and African American Artworks in Dialogue. In an extraordinary disclaimer on its website, it tells the world:
“The National Museum of African Art is aware of the recent revelations about Bill Cosby’s behaviour. The museum in no way condones this behaviour. Our current ‘Conversations’ exhibition, which includes works of African art from our permanent collection and African American art from the collection of Camille and Bill Cosby, is fundamentally about the artworks and the artists who created them, not the owners of the collections.”
Continue reading...July 13, 2015
Without Europe's generosity, Greece's museums are ancient history
It’s not all fiscal cruelty and threats of abandonment; political posturing aside, the EU and Greece know they are too dependent to split
It comes as no surprise that Greek museums have been threatened with closure in this summer’s mounting crisis. The Art Newspaper reports that museum directors feared last week their institutions would soon have to shut their doors. As the banking system itself has been on the brink of collapse this is only to be expected – but it would add yet more pain in an economy that needs to keep tourists coming. People do not only visit Greece for its blue sea and idyllic beaches. This is one of the world’s richest and most rewarding cultural destinations. If you have never seen the Parthenon or Mycenae or Delphi, planning a trip to these unmissable monuments of world history and art is one good way to support Greece. And don’t worry – they are still open for business.
The cultural heritage of Greece is also a good way to get a more honest look at its relationship with the EU. When push came to shove there was no way Greeks wanted to leave the Eurozone this weekend, to become a marginal, tenuous part of the European Community. The government accepted savage financial measures rather than let that happen. Surely this bitter agreement will stand – because Greece knows how much it needs Europe.
Continue reading...July 10, 2015
Beyoncé the building and Bieber in the buff – the week in art
Queen Bey’s body inspires a skyscraper, while Justin Bieber’s nude Instagram shots would make Michelangelo proud. Plus the best of Arles photography festival and the ‘Frankenstein’ Nefertiti – in your weekly dispatch
Marc Quinn
New works from the blood-head man. Outrageous sculptor of modern life or kitsch commissioner of bad carvings? Let’s see.
White Cube Bermondsey, London from 15 July until 13 September.
Lost in the hubbub: London galleries patronise us with this PR-led populism
It’s a crime so few galleries are willing to ditch the calculated marketing strategies and follow the passions of curators to put on genuinely worthwhile shows
Rembrandt gazes out of the darkness. He wants you to sense the very soul behind his eyes. But how can you when people are struggling for space and listening to a thousand audioguides all around you? Where is the profundity in jostling to look at the season’s hottest masterpieces in a noisy, bad-tempered blockbuster exhibition?
I did not have to cope with the crowds to see Rembrandt: The Late Works at the National Gallery last autumn, but even the early view for newspaper critics was quite intense. Visitors who did buy tickets told me they struggled to enjoy the art through the hubbub. I suppose that’s why I never went back for a second look.
Continue reading...July 9, 2015
Testino’s portrait of William and Kate is a sickly sweet lie | Jonathan Jones
This is fake PR nonsense – impossibly perfect people with impossibly perfect children. We – and the royals – deserve better
No one can photograph a fake smile like Mario Testino can. I am not saying the huge cheesy grins on the faces of Kate and William in his christening portrait of the royal nuclear family are fake. After all, they have plenty to smile about – the free houses, the free money, the free adulation, the fact there’s no chance of their kids ever having to worry about student loans, tax credits or the minimum wage. All smiles all the way. But Testino, the world’s most horrible flatterer of wealth and status, makes every smile look phoney. He makes reality itself seem a glib and cynical charade.
Continue reading...July 8, 2015
Tbilisi zoo tragedy: the pathos of an escaped hippo
The pictures of wild animals being cornered or shot in Tbilisi’s streets were sure-fire magnets of human feeling
Pity is a strange thing. Tragedy in classical theory is supposed to inspire both pity and terror, but the daily horror and violence of world news often leave us struggling to produce those responses. While we might, in principle, be shocked by James Joyce’s irritating character Stephen Dedalus when he says in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that a death in a road accident cannot be truly tragic because it is “remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions”, the reality is that no one can really feel on cue the emotions apparently required of us by a daily news stream of anniversaries of bombings and economies on the brink. But a hippo being shot with a tranquiliser dart in a flooded city street is another matter entirely.
Related: The tragedy of Tbilisi zoo – what happened next?
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