Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 207
December 3, 2014
Jonathan Jones reviews Maggi Hambling: ‘If she’s a painter, I’m Rembrandt’
National Gallery, London
A total lack of integrity distinguishes Hambling’s latest collection of daft daubs, which pastiche Pollock, Van Gogh and Monet to loathsome effect
I think of the National Gallery as a supremely tasteful place. It is a temple of high culture, revered around the world for its serious atmosphere and immaculate collection of European art. So what bizarre brainwave made its curators invite Maggi Hambling to put on an exhibition here?
Hambling is proof that you can be a well-known artist without having a soul, a brain or a good eye. She is a “painter”. Yeah, and I’m Rembrandt. People who hate conceptual art like to pretend that before the Turner prize came along, Britain was an arcadia of sensitive and skilled painters. Go and see Hambling’s daft daubs if you want proof of the emptiness of that claim. She is a painter all right, but neither sensitive nor skilled, nor imaginative, or anything else I value in art.
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December 2, 2014
2014: the year British art became irrelevant
Something faded to grey in British art in 2014. A spark of vitality went out. The avant garde became docile, introspective and irrelevant. Artists no longer shocked anyone, but instead elicited a po-faced respect, like the feeling of awe that men with white vans elicit in Ed Miliband.
Does art have to shock? Of course not. One of my favourite artists is the early 18th-century French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau, who only ever painted luscious idylls of love and nature. Watteau transports me to Cythera. Art can be beautiful, simply realist, or quiet and subtle. Obviously. But the British avant garde in recent times made shock its speciality. Our art scene was suddenly the liveliest in the world at the start of the 1990s, because the arguments it generated were so spectacular.
Continue reading...The touching hug photo from Ferguson protests is a blatant lie | Jonathan Jones
The camera is a superb liar. It only shows one moment, and has no obligation to explain the bigger picture behind it. The selective use of photographs can therefore replace truth with whatever visual detail we choose to fix on. Horror or schmaltz, the effect is the same, to simplify reality and turn a story into a deceptively straightforward image.
In the 1930s and 1940s the dishonest manipulation of photographs was a speciality of state propagandists. Backroom technicians in totalitarian darkrooms removed unwanted faces from pictures and turned emotive images into posters. Today, we don’t need propaganda machines to deceive us because we can make hypocritical and self-manipulating choices ourselves just by “liking” the pictures that show us what we want to see and ignoring those that are more awkward.
Continue reading...December 1, 2014
Shia LaBeouf's #IAM SORRY: art is often violent, but nothing can excuse rape
Performance art is a difficult genre that often exploits physical threat, as shown by artists from Marina Abramović to Yoko Ono
The actor Shia LaBeouf has told of being raped while performing his work #IAMSORRY at a Los Angeles art gallery. Was this a case of performance art creating an atmosphere in which anything, including crime, can happen?
Ever since the first ancestral performance happenings in the early 20th century, this dynamic and unpredictable form of art has been associated with violence and danger. From riotous Futurist evenings and the chaos of notorious avant-garde premieres such as that of The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, to surrealists insulting priests on the street, the moment when art becomes a kind of drama has often been a moment of physical threat.
Continue reading...November 28, 2014
David Hockney enters new phase: no more Constable
David Hockney has a mean line in self-portraits. Mean to himself, that is. As he has got older he has periodically sat or stood in front of a mirror and recorded exactly what he sees in alarmingly exact and ruthless detail. Yet this man who can stare himself in the eye so boldly admits he wasuncomfortable watching nearly two hours of his image on screen in the documentary Hockney, released in cinemas this weekend.
“I have seen the film three times. The first time I’m even a bit embarrassed by all the footage of me,” he told me from Los Angeles.
Continue reading...Mick Jagger, William Morris and Minecraft – the week in art
Tate teams up with Minecraft, Hipgnosis turn the Stones into goats, and a new Hockney documentary hits the screens – all in your weekly dispatch
Love is Enough: William Morris and Andy Warhol
Two apparently utterly different artists – one a champion of craft and communism, the other a prophet of the ready-made and capitalism – have more in common than we think according to this exhibition’s curator Jeremy Deller. Fascinating.
• Modern Art Oxford, Oxford OX1 from 6 December until 8 March
November 26, 2014
Minecraft at Tate: in gaming, the Renaissance has returned
This new collaboration is proof that video games hark back to an artistic age obsessed with realism and perspective – the Renaissance
The spaces created by video games are sublime and majestic. We wander in desolate cityscapes, eerie caverns, on rolling freeways. These worlds are three-dimensional, physically (if not emotionally) deep and complex. What could be more modern, more futuristic?
Except we’ve been here before.
Continue reading...November 25, 2014
Post Pop: East Meets West review – an exhibition beyond taste
From Paul McCarthy to Jeff Koons, this a refreshingly unprescriptive show, totally unrepressed by today’s idea of cool
If you felt envious of the French for their big art controversy of the autumn over the Los Angeleno provocateur Paul McCarthy’s “butt plug” sculpture in the classical heart of Paris, here’s your chance to be appalled.
McCarthy’s 1993 masterpiece Spaghetti Man is a lifesize statue with a rabbit head and a penis that curls in a pasta tube many metres long into a heap on the ground. It is a male fantasy made absurd, a phallic paradox. His dick is so long it is useless, like spaghetti. I felt something melt inside me.
Continue reading...November 24, 2014
Cornelius Gurlitt’s haunted treasure trove of art needs to be seen
Hated by the Nazis for their freedom and humanity, the paintings are neither poisoned gifts nor spoils of war but vital works of art
The art is innocent. It deserves to be seen. Whatever the tangle of crime and cruelty that lay behind Cornelius Gurlitt’s strange inheritance of a secret art collection from his father, who had worked for the Nazis as an art dealer, he finally did the right thing in leaving it to the Kunstmuseum Bern, and this excellent museum, which already has important works by artists such as Picasso and Paul Klee, is totally correct in accepting his bequest.
The more than 1,200 paintings and watercolours for which it will take responsibility are neither poisoned gifts nor macabre spoils, but important works of art that need to be taken out of their disreputable context and seen again simply as paintings. Some of the artists represented in this extraordinary collection lived before the Nazi era with which their works were to become entangled. Courbet, Monet and Manet had no conception of Europe’s 20th-century future. Why should there be some imaginary stain on Monet’s Waterloo Bridge?
Continue reading...Why Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is much more than Google Doodle’s poster boy
On his 150th birthday, the subversive artist has been misremembered by Google as a man who just made posters for nightclubs
Google is celebrating Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s 150th birthday by reducing him to a pop-culture cliche. Its Google Doodle shows the resident artist of the Moulin Rouge perched on a stool in front of a row of can-can dancers making a poster that says Google Google Google.
It’s the thought that counts, and at least they remembered his birthday. Nor is it Google’s fault that we have such a thin and inaccurate understanding of one of the most radical, raw and courageous of all modern artists.
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