Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 203
January 23, 2015
Selfies and sex offenders – the week in art
A potted history of self-portraits hits Margate, as a photographer enters Florida’s town for sex offenders. Plus Jurassica the theme park, and the art collective buying up ecstasy on the deep web – all in your weekly art dispatch
Rights of Nature
A daunting Patagonia landscape by Darren Almond is among the works in this timely show that explores and protests the destruction of ecology in the Americas. Participants include Amy Balkin, Subhankar Banerjee, Mabe Bethônico, Ursula Biemann, Minerva Cuevas, Jimmie Durham and many more.
Nottingham Contemporary from 24 January until 15 March
January 22, 2015
Dinosaurs: the rock stars of museums
The Jurassica project in Dorset is set to go – and I can’t wait. Dinosaurs are one animal we should feel no qualms about gawping at
Who doesn’t want to see a museum with swimming robot plesiosaurs? Forget art galleries, I’m off to Dorset if and when it opens its planned Jurassica museum.
If built, this compelling attraction (that’s close to getting the go-ahead) will transform a Portland limestone quarry into a subterranean sanctuary for sea beasts that died out millions of years ago.
Continue reading...January 21, 2015
The Clash’s Paul Simonon: this gauche biker art is a betrayal of punk
Hamfisted painting and artistic incompetence define Simonon’s solo exhibition. His time would be better spent embracing punk’s ethos and promoting real outsider artists
Punk was the golden age of the British amateur. You didn’t need to be able to play an instrument. You didn’t need anything except anger, energy and guts. Even youth was dispensable – Ian Dury was in his 30s when he recorded Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll.
The Clash (who actually could play their instruments) paid homage to that punk spirit of artistic anarchy in their 1981 song Hitsville UK: “Now the boys and girls are not alone/ Now that hitsville’s hit UK.”
Continue reading...The stone-cold truth: Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore are not in the premier league
Leave St Ives’ star sculptor, and her Yorkshire counterpart Henry Moore, as the provincial powerhouses they are. To pretend they had international influence is just petty nationalism
The sculptor Barbara Hepworth died in harness, killed in a fire at her St Ives studio in 1975, when she was 72.
Today, the studio is a shrine to this dedicated artist, and you can see the last pieces of stone she was still working on when she died. Hepworth had real belief in craft. She was hands-on, right up to the end.
Continue reading...January 20, 2015
Rubens and His Legacy: crass analogies, bad ideas – and barely any Rubens
Rubens was so great he managed to invent nudes, portraits, rainbows and even Jesus Christ – or so the Royal Academy would have us believe in its sloppy and simplistic new exhibition, Rubens and His Legacy
The irritation started when I entered the first room of the Royal Academy’s much-touted epic exhibition Rubens and His Legacy and my eyes fell on a painting by John Constable. It is hard to think of a painter who has less in common with Rubens. But the curators have spotted one connection I never guessed: they both painted rainbows. Perhaps this room should also include paintings with rainbows in them by Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay and the Chapman brothers. Why not? That is the RA’s less than precise approach to art history.
So Rubens invented the rainbow, apparently. He also invented the grand portrait, the nude and Jesus Christ – or so you might believe if you took Rubens and His Legacy seriously. To be fair, Constable’s intensely churned landscape painting Cottage at East Bergholt (c 1833) does indeed emulate the composition of Rubens’ Landscape with Rainbow (mid-1630s) hanging nearby. The trouble is, such isolated facts are given hugely exaggerated significance in this sloppy exhibition. Rubens and His Legacy tries to distort the rich and complex story of art to fit a simplistic big idea. Constable, Turner and Gainsborough – all of whose landscapes are juxtaposed with those of Rubens here – were fascinated by the great European masters: their biggest “influence” was the 17th-century French landscape artist Claude. So why try to claim that Rubens was somehow their one true source?
Continue reading...January 19, 2015
Happy shoppers: the art collective buying ecstasy on the deep web
From pills to Lord of the Rings, Mediengruppe Bitnikan brings the illicit side of the internet to life in an exhibition of items bought with bitcoins
Art has always drawn on the dark side. The sleep of reason produces monsters, warned Goya – but those monsters are prodigiously creative. Goya took macabre inspiration from witches and other horrors of the mind, and so have many artists through the centuries.
When Max Ernst found frightening faceless hordes and sinister forests in his unconscious, he was echoing the ancient Greeks who carved savage battles with centaurs on their temples. From antiquity to surrealism, the source of the most powerful images has again and again turned out to be the deep dark inner ocean of dreams and intuitions – what Freud named the “unconscious”.
Continue reading...January 18, 2015
Pub Landlord Al Murray on his election strategy: ‘I could drink Nigel Farage and William Hague under the table’
The comedian is to stand against Farage for South Thanet in the 2015 general election. But what are his guvnorment’s policies? Guardian experts question him on welfare, freedom, immigration and foreign lagers
Vote for Partridge: the characters who should follow Pub Landlord into politics
Video: Pub Landlord to challenge Nigel Farage in general election
If you get to Westminster, which of your fellow MPs would you want on a pub quiz team?
Jonathan Freedland, executive editor, opinion
Continue reading...January 16, 2015
Europe’s cultural collapse – the week in art
A €390m spaceship lands in Paris with a thud, as the 2015 Capital of Culture gets off to a shaky start. Plus the photobook without a single photo, and why drones may be banned – all in your favourite newsletter
Ian Breakwell: Important Works from the 60s and 70s
This conceptual artist with a unexpected playful streak is celebrated a decade after his death. Expect the surreal – and the explicit, warns the gallery.
Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London W1F, from 21 January until 21 February
January 15, 2015
Arts critics do not romanticise suicide
A recent study finds UK arts journalists failed to uphold guidelines on the coverage of suicide. But many artists have killed themselves, and many more explore the ethical aspects of the topic. We cannot redact difficult bits of history
Academic researchers have concluded that 100% of all the arts coverage of suicide they studied in British newspapers breached guidelines, reports Roy Greenslade in The Guardian. Specifically, they looked at 68 articles about the artists Vincent van Gogh, Mark Rothko, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Arshile Gorky, who all killed themselves. Every single story, they claim, ran roughshod over advice from the Samaritans, MediaWise Trust and Ipso by not including information on support lines, while many articles ran the risk of romanticising or glorifying suicide.
They single out two articles by Waldemar Januszczak, but I don’t see why the Sunday Times critic should stand alone. I’d like to draw attention to one of my own articles about Mark Rothko, which begins with a detailed description of the artist being discovered “lying dead in a wine-dark sea of his own blood”.
“who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,
The Oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s Contumely,
The pangs of despised Love, the Law’s delay,
The insolence of Office, and the Spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his Quietus make
With a bare Bodkin?”
Eyes in the sky: why drones should not be banned
New legislation may outlaw the use of drones by artists – just when robot aircrafts and their aerial stunts are really taking flight
We all have the right to a drone of our own. Admittedly, if everyone flies robot aircraft, the skies will get very full, and some drones are large enough and can go high enough to worry civil aviation authorities. But a drone equipped with a camera is an amazing perspective-shifting device that allows anyone to see the world in a new way.
American artists who make use of drones – from graffiti artists to anarchistic scrutineers of the security state – are worried that new regulations to be submitted to Congress by the Federal Aviation Administration later this year will make it impossible to use a drone to spray paint from above or make a video of the US-Mexico border.
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