Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 188
July 8, 2015
Justin Bieber naked: would Michelangelo have approved?
The Instagram from Bora Bora that stopped the hearts of Beliebers worldwide has a grace and poise that evokes some of the great male nudes of art history
The nude, observed Kenneth Clark, the great art historian who wrote and presented the famous BBC television series Civilisation, is the one artistic genre that connects us directly with ancient Greece. “Even Picasso”, he noted with some amazement, refers back to classical archetypes of the nude. What would Clark have made of the selfie age, when we can all become nudes instantly? (For instance, John Legend here, in a picture posted by his wife on Wednesday.)
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July 7, 2015
There is no such thing as too much Monet | Jonathan Jones
Poor Richard Shone. You can almost see the editor of the Burlington Magazine adjust his overtight cravat as he moans to the Times that “I think there is some fatigue with Monet”.
Yes, fatigue, rather like the fatigue one feels when one’s butler expects one to bring one’s own copy of the collected art criticism of Roger Fry from the library.
Related: Monet and Matisse to feature in modern garden exhibition
Continue reading...The case of the Frankenstein Nefertiti: it's time to revolt against ugly public art
As Egyptian protesters get a colossal – and colossally awful – sculpture of the ancient queen pulled down, we need to topple all the other art that’s an insult to our public spaces
Egypt has had a revolution, and we should emulate it. We need a revolution against bad public art.
Ugly sculpture is a global phenomenon. From a daft statue of Peter Falk in Budapest to the colossally kitsch couple at St Pancras Station in London, clumsily executed excuses for figurative art are insulting public spaces. And we put up with it. A few aesthetes may gripe, and online galleries have a laugh at all the unsightly art appearing everywhere, but most people passively accept the right of ignorant art-commissioning bodies and arrogant artists to impose their awful taste on the rest of us.
Egypt has shown the way forward. Workers of the world, rise up against all the bad statues
Continue reading...July 6, 2015
Soundscapes at National Gallery review – Jamie xx pointless soundtracks for paintings
National Gallery, London
Desperate to be down with the kids, this daft sound-meets-art experiment shows a great institution making a fool of itself
This is a terrifyingly insecure cultural cringe of an exhibition, a pitiful act of obeisance by the National Gallery to popular culture, contemporary art and anything else it hopes might pull in a few young people. It’s like watching Dirk Bogarde at the end of Visconti’s film Death in Venice as his black hair dye drips down his face and he loses his last shred of dignity. Only this time it is a great institution that should know better than dyeing its hair, loosening its tie and trying to groove with the kids, which is making an unseemly spectacle of itself.
Those closing moments of Death in Venice are rendered unforgettable by the lush fourth movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony heaving its tones of nervous breakdown on the soundtrack. Sound and vision work sympathetic magic in cinema. Why not in an art gallery? Why shouldn’t we experience oil paintings with a soundtrack, especially in these times when sound artists win the Turner prize and cross art-form collaborations are, you know, cool?
Continue reading...July 4, 2015
Leave London? Never – I’ll be staying, and fighting for it
The recent slew of writers leaving the capital in disgust are deluded if they think it’s getting worse. For a transplant from north Wales, London has certainly seemed divisive and repellent at times – but also magnificent
Last year my daughter found a curious relic on the Thames shore near Shakespeare’s Globe. The object she plucked from the lapping waters was a red clay tile with a dog’s pawprint clearly embedded in it. One day long ago, this tile was lying out to dry and a pooch pranced across it. It may have been a medieval or even Romano-Celtic dog; the Museum of London has Roman tiles with pawprints just like this one. Whatever, whenever, it left more of a mark on London than most of us ever will. People have come and gone from this great metropolis in their millions, arriving and leaving, one way or another, generation upon generation, for so long. Most of our stories will vanish into the big history of the big city. At least this dog left a pawprint behind.
Another way to make your mark on London is to piss at it out of the car window as you leave.
Related: Goodbye London: why people are leaving the capital
A crowd flowed over London bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Related: The city that privatised itself to death | Ian Martin
Related: Sorry, London: you’re too uncool. And way behind New York | Hadley Freeman
Continue reading...July 3, 2015
Audrey Hepburn, Damien Hirst, and the return of Athena – the week in art
The screen beauty’s blockbuster show is strangely unrevealing, as Hirst turns his hand to curating, and the poster powerhouse of kitsch is back online – in your weekly dispatch
Soundscapes
Artists and musicians including Susan Philipsz, Jamie xx and Janet Cardiff create aural responses to paintings in the National Gallery in this pioneering encounter of sound and vision.
National Gallery, London WC2, from 8 July until 6 September.
July 2, 2015
The cardinal, the prostitute and the painter: the strange story of Titian's most erotic masterpiece
It was considered a fake for a century, but now one of the UK’s greatest art treasures is back on show. So how did the Duke of Wellington get his hands on it?
Britain’s sexiest art treasure is the centrepiece of a new exhibition at Apsley House, home of the Duke of Wellington and now in the care of English Heritage. This is a painting about love and money – and it is priceless. But until recently, it lay almost unnoticed among Wellington’s paintings.
The story of this erotic masterpiece begins with a cardinal, a prostitute and a painter. In the 16th century, the great Venetian artist Titian set up his studio in Rome. He was there to paint a lavish nude for the pleasure of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, one of the richest men in Italy and someone who didn’t let clerical office restrain his libido. In fact, the model for Titian’s painting has been identified as Farnese’s mistress, Angela, a famous courtesan.
'This erotic painting was intended to make Titian’s famous nude, the Venus of Urbino, look like a nun'
Continue reading...July 1, 2015
Britain’s disdain for eastern European migrants is a betrayal of memory | Jonathan Jones
Those who are outraged over the ‘desecration’ of London’s 7/7 memorial forget our shared history of altruism and suffering in the second world war
My God, now they are desecrating our memorials! Pictures of “East Europeans”, as the Daily Mail calls them, apparently camping out at the 7/7 memorial in London’s Hyde Park, are the stuff of national outrage as we approach the 10th anniversary of the bombings that killed 52 people and wounded more than 700 on 7 July, 2005.
The photographs undoubtedly show a bizarre moment in the life of contemporary London. Headscarved rough sleepers who look like they have come straight from the eastern European countryside to the British capital have piled their bags of belongings in front of the monument’s contemplative grid of minimalist columns. The cleanness of the memorial contrasts with the mess they have made. Then again, reality is a mess. How do you keep it away from memorials? Should they be sacred spaces protected from the city, which includes homelessness among its sorrows?
Related: 7/7 London bombings: capital to mark 10th anniversary of terror attacks
Britain proved itself much more than a selfish imperial power of inward-looking little England in 1939
Continue reading...June 30, 2015
Why Athena was more than just a naff purveyor of mild erotica
It wasn’t all Tennis Girl and titillation. The high street poster shop allowed us to daydream, educated the masses about the joys of art – and now it’s back online
Athena’s best posters: not just Tennis Girl and Muscle Man Cradling BabyAthena is remembered by many people for just one thing. You know. The poster of a tennis player revealing her bottom.
Related: Athena's best posters: not just Tennis Girl and Muscle Man Cradling Baby – in pictures
Continue reading...The pope's portrait in condoms? The Catholic church has seen worse
A Milwaukee gallery has been criticised for acquiring a portrait of Pope Benedict made out of condoms – but the church has accepted far more subversive work
A Catholic dignitary who has criticised a Milwaukee museum for accepting into its collection a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI made from 17,000 condoms is being naive about the history of papal portraiture as well as refusing to acknowledge that people have real, important, serious objections to the sexual conservatism of the church.
Benedict, who has since resigned to become Pope Emeritus, claimed condoms can help spread Aids. Milwaukee artist Niki Johnson responded to this and other hardline opinions of the conservative German pope by turning his face into a collage of condoms. Now Archbishop Jerome E Listecki has denounced the “callousness” of the Milkwaukee art museum in accepting this picture as a gift.
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