Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 201
February 18, 2015
Ink-credible: do tattoos count as art?
Writing on the body is as old as time. But perhaps because it was adopted by popular culture first – every sailor had a tattoo – it hasn’t been classed as art
Tattooing is one of the greatest human artistic expressions. It may also be the oldest. An exhibition that has just opened in Hamburg is right to celebrate this rich and sensual body art.
Why was this German city so prominent in the rise of tattooing as a subculture? Because it is a port, and sailors brought the habit home in the 19th century. Since then, Hamburg’s tattoo scene has been spectacular, as shown now at the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe. Among the show’s stars are famous Hamburg tattooists such as Christian Warlich (“the Tattoo King”) and Herbert Hoffmann.
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February 17, 2015
Trading on borrowed time: shopping behind the iron curtain
Three loaves of bread in a window, cans of hairspray, a trailer-load of carrots ... David Hlynsky’s photos show that the dying days of eastern bloc communism didn’t offer much for consumers except visions of Marxist austerity
Photographs of shops in eastern Europe a quarter of a century ago have the quirky appeal of some kind of communist pop art. For the 21st-century British viewer accustomed to endless consumer goods and relentless advertising, they are likely to look charming and innocent, even idyllic. Here is the high street purged and purified: shops that sell just one thing, and tell you what it is with minimalist simplicity. A picture of a ham in what otherwise looks like a domestic window announces a ham-seller. A Moscow toy shop has only a handful of simple, plastic toys in the window. Another shop appears to sell nothing but washing powder. Does the Czech window with a picture of a rabbit seen through a telescopic sight advertise rabbits, rifles or both?
Continue reading...Perhaps this is what Anne Boleyn looked like – but why should we care? | Jonathan Jones
Putting faces on people from the past is a dangerous delusion. It makes us think we can understand past centuries more easily than is the case. But worse, it casts a spotlight on a tiny number of individuals and throws the vast majority of humankind into their shadow. Inevitably, the best-preserved, most-portrayed faces are those of the few – kings and queens, ladies and lords. Our obsession with knowing exactly what they looked like reveals a deeply conservative attitude to history that slavers over monarchs and forgets the lives of peasants.
Now it is Anne Boleyn whose face – apparently – shines out of the dark. Face recognition software has enabled Californian researchers to claim that a portrait held by Bradford Art Galleries and Museums is of Boleyn. Most of her portraits were destroyed after she was beheaded in 1536. Using a rare image of her on a coin as their template, the scientists matched it with the Bradford painting – but not with other supposed portraits of her.
Related: Possible Anne Boleyn portrait found using facial recognition software
Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
February 16, 2015
When did the comic-book universe become so banal?
From Chris Ware’s studied melancholia to Scott McCloud’s serviceable strips, graphic novelists need to go back to the sketchpad and become artists again
The other day in a bookshop I was looking at shelves and shelves of grownup comics – graphic novels if you will. I had a phase of enjoying comics – especially the wild, wild works of Alan Moore – but somehow the enthusiasm has waned. Looking at the latest acclaimed graphic novel, The Sculptor by Scott McCloud, I suddenly realised why they seem less worth an adult’s time.
The vast majority of graphic novels today are drawn with studied banality. There is a lack of ambition and verve to their visual artistry. Comic-book authors have settled into a slick style of drawing that stays within dull limits. Where are the real artists in graphic fiction?
Continue reading...February 13, 2015
Named and shamed: the six worst works of British public art | Jonathan Jones
These examples – from a dead tree in the middle of Kirkby to an eye-wounding erection off the coast of Tyneside – show how badly sculpture has lost its way
I blame Thomas Cromwell. In real life the hero of Wolf Hall was the rottweiler of the Reformation who took an enthusiastic lead in ransacking a medieval artistic heritage rooted in shared beliefs, common symbols, and a popular visual language. The dissolution of the monasteries that Cromwell spearheaded shattered this culture of public art. Every British town once had its shrines to Mary, its statues of prophets and murals of martyrs. The artistic richness that visitors to Italian cities adore could once be enjoyed in British cities, not to mention village churches.
Now we have a blasted tree. Or at least, that’s what Kirkby on Merseyside now has in the name of public art. After a planned Tesco store was cancelled, all that remains of this commercial project in Kirkby’s town centre is a public artwork partly paid for by the troubled supermarket giant. The final work will include other elements, insists artist Geoff Wood, but so far it consists of a towering replica of a dead tree.
Continue reading...Love stories and Lionel Messi – the week in art
The secrets of couples who’ve been together for over 50 years, and the World Press Photo winners ... plus art-world record breakers, a fake soul superstar, and the explosive relaunch of the Whitworth Art Gallery – in your weekly art dispatch
Adam Chodzko
This highly subversive artist presents a public artwork inspired by a mysterious 18th-century toolchest and entitled Great Expectations. Expect a tease.
• Guildhall Museum, Rochester and other local venues until September.
February 12, 2015
Kapoor’s bottomless whirlpool: a sublime spectacle from the magician of modern art
I used to think Anish Kapoor was just another contemporary artist with nothing to say – but his latest installation shows just how daring he really is
A pool of dark water swirls in a terrifying spiral, never stopping, never emitting light. It looks black and bottomless. It is the whirlpool to end all whirlpools – a spooky mixture of the vortex that sucked down the Pequod and an illustration from Stephen Hawking’s latest work on black holes. Yet this awe-inspiring phenomenon is an exhibit in an art gallery – the latest sublime spectacle from Anish Kapoor.
What will this dazzling artist think of next? British fans will find out in late March when his next exhibition opens at Lisson Gallery, in London. Meanwhile his black whirlpool, Descension, is being shown at India’s Kochi-Muziris biennale, fenced off from anyone who fancies a trip to another dimension.
Continue reading...February 11, 2015
Cogs in the machine: how the art market became obsessed with money
With a Richter selling for £30.4m and a Gauguin setting a new record for the most expensive painting ever sold, profit has disgustingly eclipsed creativity in the art world
So it really is all about money.
Where I come from, if you tell people your job has something to do with art, the conversation is soon about cash. People are schooled to see art in this way by the Antiques Roadshow and news stories about cash-in-the-attic art discoveries.
Related: The 10 most expensive paintings ever sold
Continue reading...February 10, 2015
John Singer Sargent at the National Portrait Gallery review – scintillating
Easily mistaken for a conservative throwback, Sargent’s portraits in fact are daring, haunting and astonishing
In 1906 the celebrated society portraitist John Singer Sargent painted his own august image in starched white collar and silver tie for the venerable collection of self-portraits in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. That same year in Montmartre, Pablo Picasso finished a portrait of Gertrude Stein by giving her a stone mask for a face. Picasso’s attack on the idea of the painted likeness soon led to faces becoming constellations of cubist shards or abstract ovals. The Mona Lisa got a moustache. In the lifetime of Sargent – who made it to 1925 – this avant garde assault left the traditional portrait, at which he so excelled, looking lost and archaic.
Related: How John Singer Sargent made a scene
Continue reading...February 6, 2015
New York museums are banning selfie sticks? What a heroic idea
Imagine trying to take a photo next to Starry Night, swinging the stick clumsily and tearing the sky a new comet. Have a little respect, says Jonathan Jones
At last, someone has stood up to the swilling tide of pseudo-democracy that threatens to turn museums into playgrounds and shopping malls. The selfie stick is now banned in many New York museums.
The doctrine that a museum should be full of people at all times, however uninterested they may be – bus in as many schoolchildren a day as you can cram into the galleries, never mind the resulting noise level – means that most big museums and art galleries will do anything, literally anything, to make themselves more approachable. They even collaborated with the Night at the Museum film series.
Related: To ban or not ban: Selfie sticks put museum photo policy in the crosshairs
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