Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 217
August 21, 2014
The top 10 picnics in art
The top 10 ancient Greek artworks
The top 10 talents lost in the first world war
The top 10 swimmers in art
This great painting introduces a theme the impressionists would love the bourgeois picnic but with a tough irony all its own. Manet deliberately evokes Renaissance paintings of sensual leisure in particular the masterpiece below but updates the idyll to show bohemian gents of his own class accompanied by women who may be prostitutes. It's a raw blast of reality disguised as a rustic fantasy. This picnic bites back.
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August 20, 2014
Why nudes are a fitting tribute to the Somme's fallen soldiers
Art and war are locked in a fatal embrace. Ever since ancient times, artists have treated war as a special subject: spectacular, serious and worth remembering, something to treat in lofty, violent, or simply pitiful images.
This is surely why, in this centenary of the first world war's outbreak, so many works of public art have been commissioned. In our bones, we feel the great war deserves great art; only art can do justice to its horrors. This assumption has led to the commissioning of dazzle ships in Britain, and it is shared in France too. On the battlefields of the Somme, a public artwork by South African artist Paul Emmanuel has been installed with French state support. It is a field of banners, emblazoned not with the traditional heraldic and national totems that decorate military banners but pale, ghostly images of male vulnerability. The names of the WWI dead of all nations are printed on their flesh.
Continue reading...August 19, 2014
Should hospital art be jolly or should it portray the truth about pain?
Science regularly delivers brilliant insights that stretch understanding and reveal new worlds. Then again, it sometimes produces "insights" on the order of "people like eggs because eggs taste good", or "the sun cheers everyone up" banal or tautological statements given a fresh sheen of authority by experimental data.
Some recent research on the kind of art that works best to cheer patients in hospitals is of this less-than-earth-shattering nature. Well-heeled US hospitals that decorate their corridors with cool contemporary art claim a scientific basis for their decor. They cite studies revealing that guess what patients are more likely to be cheered up by landscapes and soothing colours than by terrifying expressionist battle scenes. For example, one study concluded that "images of fearful or angry faces" should be avoided in hospital art. On the basis of such research, one American hospital that says it selects art that is "not disturbing, but uplifting and diverse".
Continue reading...August 18, 2014
The Parthenon marbles are the world's most beautiful art and that's why we should give them back
What can you do with the world's most beautiful art? Where does it belong? How should it be cared for and displayed?
The art in question is the array of sculpture created in Athens in the 5th century BC to decorate the Parthenon, the temple to Athena that still, today, dominates the skyline of the Greek capital.
Continue reading...August 14, 2014
The top 10 ancient Greek artworks
The top 10 crime scenes in art
The top 10 female nudes in art
The top 10 male nudes in art
There is a tragic pathos to this mighty sculpture of a dying hero from a temple on the Greek island of Aegina. Tragedy is a Greek concept. The tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus are still performed. This statue shows a strong man fallen, heroic to his last breath.
Continue reading...August 7, 2014
The top 10 suns in art
The top 10 skyscrapers in art
The top 10 artistic talents lost in the first world war
The top 10 swimmers in art
The sun filled the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall and drew crowds to experience a cosmic vision in this sublime installation that brought the outside world inside. Romantic sun-lovers like Turner and Friedrich haunt Eliasson's embracing, dream-inciting art.
Continue reading...August 1, 2014
Photobombing with Beyoncé and the newsagents made of felt the week in art
Summerhall festival art
This energy-filled, chaotic-seeming culture factory brings art to the Edinburgh fringe and the fringe to art. Its raucous mix of shows this year includes Genesis Breyer P-Orridge strutting avant-garde lifestyle choices, Susan Hiller communicating with aliens, customised art pinball machines and many more delights. There's even a bus stop on the roof by artist Kenny Watson. The whole place is a true fringe joy.
Summerhall, Edinburgh, from 1 August to 26 September.
A Russian soldiers Ukraine selfies are not evidence, theyre war art | Jonathan Jones
Selfies are not about to become the new military intelligence. They may, however, be the new war art.
It is claimed that self-portraits posted on a Russian soldiers Instagram account may prove the Russian army has been operating inside eastern Ukraine, raising the possibility that not only Russian technology but also Russian operators were involved in the destruction of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.
Continue reading...July 31, 2014
A novel about people who say they're working on novels? How novel
Despite dark declarations that the novel is dead, that this quintessentially modern literary form, invented (as we know it) in 18th-century Britain cannot survive the age of social media, artist Cory Arcangel's new book, Working on My Novel has just been published, contradicting those naysayers.
For it seems a lot of people out there are doing just that. Not only are they working on "my novel", but they tweet that they're "working on my novel". Arcangel's discovery of a vast online community of aspiring novelists is hugely reassuring to techno-believers who would hate to admit that some of the cultural effects of the internet and social media might be, y'know destructive.
Continue reading...Edinburgh art festival 2014: I'd much rather be in morally squalid Berlin
In a basement hidden at the heart of Edinburgh's botanic garden, while families admire flowers in their wholesome beds, two German prostitutes are discussing their trade. One is telling the other in a raucous machine-gun-like accent how her client put Tabasco sauce on his cock. As they discuss this, both collapse in laughter in their wigs and suspenders.
Isa Genzken's video The Little Bus Stop (Scaffolding) is a hilarious homage to the decadent 1970s German film classics of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with a dash of the German schoolteacher from the British comedy The League of Gentlemen thrown in. Genzken is one of the prostitutes; the one with the fantastically strange voice is painter Kai Althoff. He throws himself into the role while she makes deadpan comments such as: "We have a really good job. You meet a lot of interesting people."
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