Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 193
May 20, 2015
As Prince Charles and Gerry Adams meet, history hangs there like smoke | Jonathan Jones
I quickly became fascinated by the video, playing it over and over again. It was the sound that got me - noisy, bland, impenetrable as it was. If not for an imminent deadline I might have spent hours trying to crack that enigmatic soundtrack, like a character in Brian de Palma’s Blow Out or Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. As it was I played the clip at different volumes, through different speakers, but the brief dialogue between Prince Charles and Gerry Adams never got any clearer. The most you can catch is the deep intonation of Adams’s voice, but the words are lost.
Related: Prince Charles and Gerry Adams share historic handshake
A bland greeting? It does not look like one. It looks as if he is saying something emotional and deliberate
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May 19, 2015
Should the public vote for the artist on the new £20 note? No way – they've got terrible taste
The Bank of England wants the public to pick an artist to appear on the new £20. Here’s why it’s a gamble that will never pay off
What’s the matter with the Bank of England? Has it no opinions of its own? After getting bitten by online democracy over removing Elizabeth Fry from the £5 note – it had to put Jane Austen on the tenner to allay feminist criticism – the bank is now taking no chances with plans for an artist on the new £20. It is inviting us to suggest our favourites.
Oh great. Not only does our future in Europe hang on the whim of the great British public, but now we’ll also get whatever artist can attract a tidal wave of nominations as the next heroic face on our currency. Will it be JMW Turner? Or John Constable?
Related: Bank of England calls on public to think of visual artist to grace new £20 note
Continue reading...Palmyra: is saving priceless antiquity as important as saving people?
As Islamic State threatens more of Syria’s architectural splendours, it’s so clear that these stones are worth crying over – and guarding by air strikes if it comes down to it
Do ancient ruins matter compared with human lives? That is the painful question whenever an archaeological site comes under threat from the hammers and bulldozers of the terrorist army Islamic State. It is becoming a depressingly familiar scenario. IS gets its hands on one of the world cultural treasures in which Syria and Iraq are so rich. Western intellectuals bleat about the loss to civilisation as the iconoclasts set about their brutal work. Boris Johnson goes full Churchillian.
But when the dust settles – literally – over razed monuments, for many people that question remains. So what? It is tragic when ruins vanish, but surely not as tragic as the loss of a single actual living person. How can you cry for stones when children are dying?
Continue reading...May 18, 2015
Sebastião Salgado: my adventures at the ends of the Earth
He has spent his life taking epic, mind-swarming photographs of gold mines, oil fields and genocide. But now Sebastião Salgado is turning his lens on the planet’s last undamaged places
Hundreds of people are swarming up ladders, scaling the cliff-like sides of a gargantuan, man-made pit. Is it a picture of hell? Some kind of spirit photograph showing life in the Aztec empire? In fact, Sebastião Salgado’s photograph captures gold-grubbers pouring up the side of an opencast mine at Serra Pelada in Brazil. One of a jaw-dropping series he took of the crazed gold rush that created this great hole in the Earth in the 1980s, the shot is bizarrely timeless and disorienting. Few photographs have such power – to make you question your assumptions about the world, to show you something unbelievable yet utterly real.
Salgado is a photojournalist who seeks out the most moving, unsettling, perspective-shifting images of life on Earth. From his mind-swarming images of the Serra Pelada gold mine to his most recent epic labour Genesis, which documents the last pockets of undamaged nature and unmodernised peoples on Earth, Salgado shows secrets from remote places: things you thought were lost, crimes you never imagined. There could scarcely be a better choice for a lifetime achievement award from Photo London, an art fair opening at Somerset House this week. In addition to an exhibition of the Genesis prints, it will feature works by, among others, Stephen Shore, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Vik Muniz and Ori Gersht.
Continue reading...Why Peggy Guggenheim's heirs should keep their hands off her collection
Despite what the great collector’s relatives are saying in a legal proceeding, her intimate museum in Venice is one of the wonders of the modern art world – and has in no way betrayed her joyous vision
Think of a modern art museum, almost any modern art museum. What words come to mind? Is it thrilling, daunting, provocative? Does it hum with the shock of the new?
Two of the words you would probably be least likely to use for the majority of modern art collections are “charming” and “intimate”. Yet those are the words I was cooing when I recently revisited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Related: Guggenheim descendants in French court battle over art treasures
Continue reading...May 15, 2015
Stroke of genius: Peter Doig's eerie art whisks the mind to enchanted places
Amid the impostures that sometimes pass for 21st-century art, Doig’s record-breaking compositions are jewels of imagination and haunting vision
It must be the most expensive canoe in history. This week in Manhattan a painting by Edinburgh-born Peter Doig of a small white boat lost in a tangle of weeds and tree stumps in some remote wilderness went under the hammer for $26m (£16.6m) in a sale that puts him unquestionably in the top financial echelon of living artists. It is the latest chapter in the most unlikely and heartwarming success story in 21st-century art.
Doig is a decent man, a generous teacher and a talented artist. More than a decade ago, I visited his studio when I was writing a catalogue for an exhibition he was about to have in Santa Monica with his friend Chris Ofili. They had neighbouring studios in east London at the time: both now live and work mostly in Trinidad. Doig spent most of the time praising Ofili. Yet all around us in his studio were his own paintings which have since become some of the most famous of our time.
Picasso or bust: why Fox and other puritans find his work so shocking
In censoring the breasts in Women of Algiers during a TV report on its record-breaking sale, Fox proved the raw sexuality of his paintings is still vital
I am not surprised Fox has censored Picasso’s breasts. It is absurd and creepy to blur out the bosoms of his Women of Algiers in a report on the painting that set a new world record this week. But it is not completely impossible to understand, because if you were a puritan or a fundamentalist or just hated women’s bodies, Picasso’s breasts are the kind of breasts you might find shocking.
Related: Picasso painting breaks record for most expensive artwork sold at auction
Continue reading...May 10, 2015
Why are lefties such philistines about the past? | Jonathan Jones
Disdain for heritage – like the fire-damaged Clandon Park House – cuts us off from our landscape and identity. To understand these ‘relics’ is to understand England
In past ages we might have regarded it as a prodigious event full of political portent – which, as it turns out, would have been no dumber than believing in opinion polls. Just over a week before the election fire tore through the 18th-century masterpiece that is Clandon Park House. Did it matter? Or was it good riddance to a Downton Abbey-style monument of conservative cultural nostalgia?
For many people, old toffs’ houses are the stuff of Tory ascendancy. We are supposed to prefer the architecture of 1970s housing estates or the gross ostentation of the Shard to Palladio, the Italian genius who inspired Clandon Park’s lost elegance. You think I am exaggerating? Step forward Labour leadership hopeful Chuka Umunna, who in today’s Observer suggested moving MPs out of “the relic that is the Palace of Westminster and into a new, modern, accessible site fit for purpose”.
Related: The end of Downton Abbey: why I won't be shedding a tear
Disdain for heritage is ignorant, crass, and cuts us off from Britain’s landscape and identity
Continue reading...Tate Modern at 15: still delivering the shock of the new
The Bankside museum has transformed modern art from an elite cult into mass entertainment, but is it time to get down to some proper studying?
Its dark Satanic hulk rising out of nondescript land on the wrong side of the Thames was the shock of the new set down in brick. It was 1999, and I was taking a hard-hat tour of the nearly completed conversion of Bankside power station into Tate Modern. In my mind I visualised Jackson Pollock paintings in the as-yet empty galleries and a heavy metal Richard Serra sculpture in the colossal Turbine Hall. Modernism was coming and it was going to change Britain.
A year after that, and exactly 15 years ago this week, a brass band pumped out Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass at Tate Modern’s opening party. Writers and politicians mingled in the crowd, a theatrical pageant of New Labour Britain finding its perfect stage against architecture redolent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But where were the Richard Serras? This was the shock of the new, but not as I knew it.
Continue reading...May 8, 2015
Venice Biennale begins with a bang – the week in art
Sarah Lucas’s smoking vaginas descend on Venice, as Peter Kennard’s subversive pacifist art takes over the Imperial War Museum and Frida Kahlo’s lost wardrobe gets opened up. Plus Grayson Perry’s Taj Mahal in Essex and Cornelia Parker remakes the Magna Carta – in your weekly dispatch
Peter Kennard
Britain’s unofficial war artist has been making pacifist art for decades, turning Constable’s Hay Wain into a CND protest image and more recently creating Tony Blair’s Iraq War selfie. Give montage a chance.
• Imperial War Museum, London from 14 May until 30 May 2016.
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