Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 211
October 24, 2014
Why does the Daily Mail love to hate art?
The Mail loathes Tracey Emin, the Turner prize and modern art in general. Yet it elevates puerile jokers, pranksters and gimmick-peddlers to the status of artist
The Daily Mail is serious about art. So serious that it recently ran a lofty denunciation of Tracey Emin, her latest show at White Cube, and the Guardian reviewer me who self-immolated in his admiration for her banal doodlings.
Yes, the Mail is so serious about art that it does not have an actual art critic: its diatribe against the idea, god forbid, that a woman called Tracey might have talent was penned by its theatre critic Quentin Letts, whose lack of actual expertise in art drove him to quote Artwatch UK, the Ukip of aesthetics. Asking its opinion of Emin is like asking Nigel Farage if he thinks illegal immigrants should be eligible for the Turner prize.
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October 23, 2014
Golfers and asylum seekers: a clash of realities
They look exhausted, wretched and disconsolate. Suspended in space, between the desert and the green, 12 or 13 people hang and hunch and slump in their sunlit limbo, while below those who have been born to sweet delight play sport, slowly, calmly and with studied contempt.
The obscenity of this photograph lies in the willed indifference of the golfers. They play as if they could not see the desperate danglers so close to their pampered game. They are clad in expensive, well-laundered white clothes and equipped with caddies of top-notch gear. The creases and cleanness of their apparel are obvious even at a distance and contrast glaringly with the shabby garb of the migrants. The players shine in the African sun, their unwilling audience wears clothes that grimly repel it.
Continue reading...October 21, 2014
Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude review a feminist artist ahead of his time
Cortauld Gallery, London
The Austrian artists passionate love of women is illuminated in one of the most important and sexy exhibitions of the year
Sex and stockings: Egon Schieles nudes in pictures
Egon Schiele is the man who loved vaginas. He quite liked stockings, too, as the Courtauld Gallery reveals in its sensational exhibition of his erotic art. But while his delight in stereotypical garb how many colours of stockings did they manufacture in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, anyway? may make him seem like just another male voyeur, his delight in the vagina sets him apart as an artist who not only lusts after but genuinely adores women. No one can call him phallocentric.
Many great modern artists in his age lived in terror of women. Picassos explosive painting Les Demoiselles dAvignon is full of fear and loathing. The spectre of female sexuality is a jagged, castrating threat in this and other modernist images. The surrealists can also be branded misogynists for their obsessive yet objectifying images of dream lovers. Vaginas in their art often have teeth.
Continue reading...From Byzantine bannings to the Jeff Koons attack: the lamest art vandalism ever
The recent lacklustre spray-paint job on a Jeff Koons is nothing new in art ... rubbish vandals have always been with us
Jeff Koons retrospective targeted by vandal
The man who attacked a Jeff Koons exhibition with spray paint joins a long line of pointless art vandals. Why bother to attack art when your gesture will have none of the eloquence of art itself?
I know what someone out there is saying eloquent? Jeff Koons? And that would appear to be the spraypainters point of view. Art criticism with a spray can. Big museums put on retrospectives of an artist like Koons its disgusting. Grrr. Vandalisms what this kind of art deserves.
Continue reading...Tutankhamun does not deserve this 21st-century desecration | Jonathan Jones
Leave poor Tutankhamun alone. Hands off the boy king. Let him sleep his eternal sleep in the dignity of his golden mask.
If there really was a curse of the pharoahs, then scorpions and scarab beetles would surely be crawling right now into the pants of those responsible for archaeologys latest attack on the dignity of the dead. A virtual autopsy of Tutankhamun has revealed as one report has it The REAL face of King Tut. That face turns out to be distinctly unhealthy looking, with bad teeth (shock) in the digitally constructed image of a young man whose congenital problems in a world without modern medicine probably decided his short life span. As the same headline continues, Pharaoh had girlish hips, a club foot and buck teeth
Continue reading...October 20, 2014
Giovanni Battista Moroni at the Royal Academy review quietly magical and erotically charged
The little known 16th-century Italian painter loved to paint exquisite clothing and craftsmen, but it was lavish portraits of men that really inspired him
The tailor looks back at you with an intimate, familiar cock of the head. He must have been a close friend of Giovanni Battista Moroni. It is easy to picture them both as local characters in their small north Italian city. The tailor and his mate the painter, drinking wine on an evening in downtown Bergamo. Their pal the doctor also hangs nearby, in another of Moronis beguilingly frank portraits.
There are almost no other paintings from the Renaissance that can be compared with Moronis masterpiece The Tailor (which dates from around 1570) in the way it praises and dignifies manual work. The tailor is busy tailoring. Even as he looks at us with such sensitivity, he is cutting a piece of black cloth for a client. What makes Moroni break with the elitism of his age to praise a worker and his work?
Continue reading...Shocked by Paul McCarthy's butt plug? You obviously haven't seen his phallic Pinocchio
McCarthys controversial sculpture, Tree, has been vandalised in Place Vendrome and the artist assaulted. Why are Parisians being so prudish? This is nowhere near his scandalous best
Paul McCarthy butt plug sculpture in Paris provokes rightwing backlash
Anality is in the eye of the beholder. An inflatable sculpture by American artist Paul McCarthy has been vandalised and the artist himself assaulted after a flurry of outrage in Paris over a sculpture that is said to resemble a type of sex toy known, I am informed, as a butt plug.
I feel old fashioned that I had to be told that. The work is called Tree, and if I didnt know about the accusation that it looks like a sex toy, I would probably have taken the title at face value. Well, perhaps not entirely. The chances of McCarthy erecting anything as innocent as a tree seem slight when you consider this surrealists oeuvre.
Continue reading...October 17, 2014
Jimmy Nail at Frieze and the great Picasso scandal the week in art
Frieze is back with Jimmy Nail-inspired art and theres a crisis in Paris over Picasso. Plus the return of Steve McQueen, Egon Schieles daring nudes and haunted houses in America all in your favourite weekly dispatch
Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude
In the age of Sigmund Freud the artists of the waning Austro-Hungarian Empire explored sexuality with daring and abandon. Egon Schiele was bravest of all. This is the greatest erotic art of the 20th century.
Courtauld Gallery, London WC2R from 23 October until 18 January.
Why is political art such elitist twaddle?
Radical artists are always keen to make a statement; just look at this years Turner prize crop. But their work needs to engage with humanity, otherwise its just elitist masturbation
Politics is responsible for some very bad art. Or is it that art is responsible for some really dumb politics?
Two of the artists on this years Turner prize shortlist claim political credibility for their work. Ciara Phillips created her prints and texts in collaboration with a protest group, Justice for Domestic Workers. Yet nothing coherent about how to change the world comes out of her Turner exhibit. Maybe it worked better on the streets, with the people.
Continue reading...October 16, 2014
Was William Morris actually just a pious bore?
By presenting the artist as a hero of the left, the National Portrait Gallerys new show utterly misses the point about his true revolutionary spirit
National Portrait Gallery explores William Morriss belief in art for all
Was William Morris a great designer? Or just the father of floral wallpaper? Was his socialist vision of the life beautiful anything more than a nostalgia for medieval craft skills? This exhibition fails to acknowledge that such questions might even be asked, and considers it as so axiomatic that Morris is an inspiring hero that it forgets to set out a coherent case for his creative achievement. There are more anecdotes than art here, and many of those are about long-forgotten Marxists and anarchists.
The British left is currently secluded in a comfort zone where the proper values are unquestionably good and moral superiority is all. That may sound like a digression into the affairs of the Labour party, but it applies precisely to this exhibition. The revolutionary beliefs of William Morris are presented here as if they make him, by definition, important and wonderful. His links with the likes of Prince Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, his personal copy of Marxs Capital, and his influence on British radicals from EP Thompson to Jeremy Deller are complacently wheeled out, as if we were all folk-song enthusiasts for whom the ethical imperatives of eating hand-woven food were beyond argument. Is this how the left ends, cooing over Morriss utopian tract News from Nowhere while Ukip worms away at the books fine binding?
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