Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 196
April 16, 2015
Stroke of genius: why do artists love cats?
A new book would have us believe artists have a kinship with paws and whiskers. But on closer inspection, they’re not all cuddles
Do artists have a pet of choice? A new book full of cute old photographs of artists and their cats makes it look that way.
Henri Matisse and his feline friend, Georgia O’Keeffe with her moggy, Salvador Dalí and his – it looks, from this collection of double portraits, as if the artistic temperament has always been drawn to paws and whiskers.
Continue reading...
Armchair anarchists – sit back and enjoy this golden age of political stunts | Jonathan Jones
The face of protest is changing. In the years immediately after the 2008 financial crisis, mass rallies took over the streets of Athens and Madrid. Anger was aggressive. At some moments, it seemed societies might break down. But as that master of comedy Karl Marx pointed out, the philosopher Hegel missed a trick when he said history always repeats itself. Hegel forget to add, said Marx, that it tends to do so the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
There was a vivid farcical quality to Josephine Witt’s one-woman protest at the European Central Bank press conference this week. As the bank’s president, Mario Draghi, tried to speak about the endless process of nursing the EU economy and keeping Greece within it, she suddenly leapt on to his desk, showered him with gold glitter, and threw around flyers condemning the bank’s “undemocratic” policies. As the security men grabbed her she managed to show the cameras a T-shirt which had a slogan saying “End the ECB dick-tatorship”.
A well-staged protest can similarly sell any politics you like, however crude
Related: Protester disrupts European Central Bank press conference - as it happened
Continue reading...April 15, 2015
Don’t fall for a fake: the Chauvet cave art replica is nonsense
The French government has spent millions replicating a cave of 35,000-year-old art masterpieces. But you wouldn’t pay to see a Rembrandt copy – why is ancient art treated so callously?
Picture this. Visitors to the Vatican arrive in St Peter’s Square and are shepherded into a modern reception centre cleverly hidden under Bernini’s colonnades. After looking at a display on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes, they are filtered into a full-scale replica, with a ceiling that is a giant photograph of the famous artwork.
Perhaps one day this may come about, as the Vatican worries about preserving its artistic treasures. But I suspect no one would be very happy to visit a substitute Sistine Chapel. What would be the point?
Continue reading...April 14, 2015
Francis Bacon and the Masters review – a cruel exposure of a con artist
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia
Placed beside Picasso, Velázquez, Matisse, Rodin and others, Soho’s perverse putdown master emerges from a conversation with genius with no real heart – and absolutely nothing to say
Francis Bacon was the divine devil of modern British art, a demon of dark ecstasy. His pummelling of human flesh has a monstrous sensuality, a massive power. Usually, seeing a Bacon, I drink in its perverse colours like blood or wine. At least, I used to. After this exhibition, I don’t know if I can ever take Francis Bacon seriously again.
What a shame. All his life, Bacon looked at and wanted to reinvent the art of the great masters. This show opens with giant photographs of his mad nest of a studio, its paint-stained floor littered with reproductions of works by the art heroes he longed to rival. His paintings of imprisoned popes were inspired by Velázquez’s portrait of Innocent X; his contortions of the human body by Michelangelo’s turbulent statues. It surely makes sense to set Bacon’s paintings side by side with works by the masters he loved.
Continue reading...April 12, 2015
I scream for ice-cream: is this the most nauseating food art ever?
Michael Massaia believes his melted puddles of multicoloured ice-cream are abstract art – but they just make me sick. All that’s missing is a hot pavement and some flies
My boy lollipop: Michael Massaia’s ice-cream art – in picturesArt and food have an ancient and mysterious relationship. Artists have been depicting what they eat since the Ice Age – the bison and mammoths in cave paintings were food for paleolithic hunters.
Yet there’s more going on here than meets the eye – literally. When we look at images of food, more than one sense is involved. The tastebuds kick in, the tummy reacts. Art can perform a bizarre mental trick by depicting food; it can operate on the part of the brain that perceives flavours.
Continue reading...April 10, 2015
Bronze zombies, Neil MacGregor and Prince Harry kills off the selfie – the week in art
The brilliant British Museum director is standing down, as terrible statues are ruining art and the prince puts the final nail in the selfie coffin. Not to mention Jesus Christ, the family man and Facebook’s new HQ – it’s your weekly art dispatch
One of the great pioneers of abstract art electrifies Tate Modern with swirling painted light.
• Tate Modern, London SE1, from 15 April until 9 August.
April 9, 2015
Smirk of art: Dallas museum prankster's satirical display makes us laugh – at him
Teen philistine Jack Dudeham clearly doesn’t get modern art if he thinks everyday objects can’t be used to create conceptual masterpieces
Were art gallery visitors who mistook sunglasses and a watch placed on the floor by a witty teenager victims of a joke on modern art? Or was the culprit the real joke?
It is not the first time conceptual art has caused the kind of confusion that in some eyes mocks its pretensions. The misunderstandings tend to take the inverse form of cleaners mistaking artworks for trash and clearing them away. This time, a Twitter user Jack Dudeham put his own possessions into the frame then photographed people mistaking them for art.
i set down my watch and sunglasses in #an abstract exhibit at the DMA pic.twitter.com/D8v6mJHNl0
Continue reading...Civilisation 2: how should Kenneth Clark’s masterpiece be rebooted?
The witty series could be remade, shot for shot, with Benedict Cumberbatch as its presenter – or perhaps a naughty standup should take the helm? Series consultant Jonathan Jones dreams up a 21st-century version – and busts the myths about the great champion of high art
The BBC’s plan to remake Civilisation, the great 1969 television series written and presented by Kenneth Clark, is a topic to set hearts racing. What an ambitious idea, what an audacious project. Can British TV in the 21st century match the heights it reached in the era of Civilisation, not to mention the similarly ambitious television essays it inspired and provoked, from The Ascent of Man to The Shock of the New?
The proposed new show was mentioned this week, naturally enough, in a Guardian editorial speculating on what retiring British Museum director Neil MacGregor may do next. MacGregor is plainly a man who could step into Clark’s shoes; they have even held the same job as director of the National Gallery.
Continue reading...April 8, 2015
Neil MacGregor saved the British Museum. It’s time to reinvent it again
With his radical, subversive instincts, MacGregor redefined what a global art collection can and should be. Who will – who can – fill the gap he leaves?
It is hard to remember how irrelevant the British Museum seemed before Neil MacGregor saved it. There was something dowdy and confused about this treasury of world art. Its collections were splendid – at least when the room you wanted to see happened to be open on the day you went. But its exhibitions were often dull or silly – there was even one that looked at Agatha Christie and archaeology. Such desperate attempts to popularise the past revealed a museum whose experts had no idea how to communicate their knowledge.
Related: British Museum director Neil MacGregor to step down
Continue reading...Jesus Christ the family man? Why the church won’t buy it
New scientific evidence on the tomb of Jesus – and his wife and child – will never be accepted. Religion prefers its relics, like its art, with smoke and mirrors
If only the great arguments between religion and doubt could be settled by scientific evidence. A story this week has it that solid evidence has emerged about the historical Jesus: the “tomb of Jesus” reportedly contains proof that Jesus was married, had a son – and was never resurrected.
So that’s settled then. Or at least it would be if the scholarly world unanimously accepted these claims (which seems unlikely) or if religious belief were grounded in evidence. If that were the case, all religious belief would have disappeared when Charles Lyell uncovered the nature of geological processes and intimated the true age of Earth in the 1830s – the first clear evidence of a godless natural world.
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
