Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 197
April 7, 2015
The scourge of the bronze zombies: how terrible statues are ruining art
It may be time to ban artists from creating statues. They have simply lost the ability to do it. The art that once gave us Michelangelo’s David and Rodin’s Burghers of Calais has degenerated into a cynical province of second-rate hacks who are filling up city squares, railway stations and other public spaces all over the world with ugly, stupid and occasionally terrifying parodies of the human form.
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RIP the selfie: when Prince Harry calls time on a craze, you know it's well and truly dead
The selfie was the great silliness of our time, the trainspotting of the techno age. So take them if you dare – the world is laughing at you
Remember selfies? They became a global cultural obsession in 2012, when Time magazine made selfie one of its top 10 buzzwords of the year. For a while, it seemed the selfie was the pop art of the future. Everyone, from teenagers to prime ministers, was taking them, everywhere. The invention of the selfie stick turned the taking of selfies into an even stranger performance.
Then, by the end of 2015, selfies slunk back into the subcultural margins. People still took them, but with an embarrassed shrug. There was no longer anything cool about inanely grinning into your own camera. Selfie sticks were banned in many places, and sneered at everywhere. Time magazine declared the trend over with its RIP Selfie cover.
Related: Simon Schama announces portrait gallery displays with attack on selfies
Continue reading...April 6, 2015
I can worship religious art without believing in God
For centuries, religious artists like Zurbarán and Caravaggio have created ecstatic, hallucinatory work that can move even a staunch atheist like me
Atheism has never come up with anything like the art of 17th-century painter Francisco de Zurbarán, who created a pure and intense religious visual language. I find his images uniquely appealing at Easter – even though I don’t believe in his, or any other, god.
Zurbarán worked in Seville in the days when this Andalucían city created its renowned Holy Week rituals. In his painting Agnus Dei, a trussed lamb, bound for death, symbolises Christ. In The Apostle Saint Peter Appearing to Saint Peter Nolasco, the supposed founder of the Catholic church, appears to a Christian visionary.
Continue reading...April 3, 2015
Tracey Emin is still the real thing – and that's why we love her
With an exhibition of works inspired by her hero Egon Schiele opening in Vienna, the artist talks about ‘mad Tracey from Margate’, conceptual art and sex
She was drunk. She was foulmouthed. And somehow she had stumbled on to a live television programme among a group of art critics, all male.
“I wasn’t even aware I was on television,” says Tracey Emin 18 years after a spectacular performance in a TV debate following the 1997 Turner prize made her a celebrity. As Waldemar Januszczak and Roger Scruton tried to argue about conceptual art, Emin declared, among other nuggets: “Don’t you understand? I want to be free. Get this fucking mike off.”
When I got nominated for the Turner prize, I was asleep. Mat woke me up and there was a picture of my bottom on screen
I haven’t had sex for five years. More. It’s something gone. It’s like a memory or something
People who knew me couldn’t believe that this out-of-touch figurative painter was suddenly having a show at White Cube
Related: Tracey Emin: soundtrack of my life
Continue reading...April 1, 2015
As its director quits, Tate Britain must find the fun factor – or shut its doors
Now Penelope Curtis is leaving, the intellectually impoverished cousin of the Bankside behemoth is free to flourish ... if only it can start seducing us
Tate Britain has been in the news this week – but the biggest story was the least reported. Amid all the excitement about Tracey Emin’s My Bed returning “home”, the Millbank museum more quietly revealed that its director Penelope Curtis is to leave after just five controversial years.
Curtis had become the focus of interest at Tate Britain in a way that wasn’t healthy for her or the museum. Her record was actually mixed: she improved the main collection displays, putting more of the Tate’s collection on view. That was good.
Related: Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis to step down after five years in charge
Continue reading...March 31, 2015
The V&A’s election show is ‘the artistic equivalent of a hung parliament’
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
All of This Belongs to You was supposed to be a timely defence of free, publicly funded museums for voters to consider. Instead, a number of weak exhibits turn its message into a shaggy dog story
The V&A has done something daring and launched an exhibition about the public sphere to coincide with the general election. Unfortunately, it mirrors the election result currently forecast by opinion polls. All of This Belongs to You is the artistic equivalent of a hung parliament, confused and confusing and without a decisive message.
Only the title lives up to the title. As you enter the V&A, a big illuminated sign boldly declares: “All of This Belongs to You.” It resembles an artwork by Martin Creed or Nathan Coley but was in fact knocked up by the show’s designers. It’s an apposite statement at the start of this election. For the collections of the V&A and other public museums really do belong to us, and their future is in our hands. The very concept of publicly funded free museums, like the NHS, relies on a belief in large-scale state spending that seems unlikely to survive the £30bn worth of cuts planned by the Conservative party.
Continue reading...The Joey Essex and Nick Clegg ‘selfie’ shows a political system in crisis | Jonathan Jones
Nick Leg. That’s how I’ll remember him. Soon, the leader of the Liberal Democrats may be glad if people talk about him by whatever name they like – for in this election the abyss beckons for a generation of politicians who never made enough people care who they are, what they do or if they vanish from public life after 7 May.
Already, Clegg seems to be practising for a life of D-list celebrity. He happily posed with former The Only Way is Essex star Joey Essex for a selfie, even though Essex admits he used to think Clegg’s surname was Leg and claims to have thought the Liberal Democrats were called Liberal Democats.
Related: The day Joey Essex hijacked the Liberal Democrats' campaign tour
Continue reading...March 30, 2015
The selfie museum: why big art galleries should take it seriously
Selfiemania has hit new heights with a wacky dedicated museum. So why are traditional galleries enforcing selfie stick bans – when it could put them out of business?
Selfiemania in art galleries has reached new heights of surreal comedy at a museum in Manila. Art in Island is a museum specifically designed for taking selfies, with “paintings” you can touch, or even step inside, and unlimited, unhindered photo opportunities. It is full of 3D reproductions of famous paintings that are designed to offer the wackiest possible selfie poses.
Meanwhile, traditional museums are adopting diverse approaches to the mania for narcissistic photography. I have recently visited museums with wildly contrasting policies on picture taking. At the Prado in Madrid, all photography is banned. Anything goes? No, nothing goes. Guards leap on anyone wielding a camera.
Continue reading...March 27, 2015
Nude art tours, elves and the biggest building in Europe – the week in art
The man hosting nudist gallery viewings, the power of Iceland’s ‘hidden people’ and the mega mirrored middle finger to nature planned for a tiny Alpine town – all in your weekly art dispatch
In her new paintings called Geldbilder, the provocative German artist explores money as an artistic theme and medium. As the Euro struggles, Genzken pastes it into paintings and continues her dadaist commentary on modern life.
• Hauser and Wirth, London W1S, from 26 March until 16 May.
March 25, 2015
Would I do a nude art tour? Sod that
The artist James Turrell wants his works to be viewed in the nude. But would it add anything to the gallery experience ... other than shame?
Would you get naked in an art gallery? If so head for Canberra, where the National Gallery of Australia is offering naked tours of an exhibition for the first time. You can join a nude tour of James Turrell’s light-filled retrospective there, because the artist claims that we drink in light through our skin, so nudity adds a new dimension to his hallucinatory installations of living colour.
Whatever you say, Mr Turrell. His art is a perceptual overload. Your sense of space is changed by his rooms of light. Colour seems solid, dimensions blur. So yes, I can imagine it might be enriching to experience it nude.
Related: Artist James Turrell: I can make the sky any colour you choose
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