Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 218
July 31, 2014
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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July 30, 2014
The top 10 skyscrapers in art
The top 10 artistic talents lost in the first world war
The top 10 swimmers in art
The top 10 crime scenes in art
The most charismatic of New York skyscrapers is the solitary star of Warhol's film, which lingers with unapologetic monotony for eight hours and five minutes on the majesty of the Empire State Building. It is best viewed not as a narrative film (that would drive you mad) but as if it were a painting. As such, it is full of love for Manhattan's lofty architecture.
Continue reading...July 29, 2014
How silk bulletproof vests and Bibles could have rewritten human history
Tests prove that a bulletproof silk vest could have stopped the first world war
It is a tiny bright circle of colour imprisoned under glass. Hans Holbein's miniature of Anne of Cleves is a miraculous little portrait that, supposedly, changed the course of history.
Continue reading...The GoPro strapped to a speeding car and a history of psychedelic art
It's a whirling abstract spiralling vortex of colour but is it art?
Ryan Fox attached a GoPro camera to a car wheel and drove around with spectacular results. His video, made for a class at the University of Wisconsin, would surely have intrigued such early 20th-century avant garde artists as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy or Aleksandr Rodchenko.
Continue reading...July 28, 2014
Is JMW Turner Britain's greatest artist?
Joseph Mallord William Turner is Britain's greatest artist.
What? Who says? What about Constable, or Lucian Freud? How do you even measure such a claim?
Continue reading...So much architecture is monstrous thats why we like to see it demolished | Jonathan Jones
Locals who cheered when three cooling towers were destroyed at Didcot reveal the truth avant-garde structures are most popular when they fall
The towers crumble in a second. Concrete becomes dust. In the early morning light an era has ended.
Continue reading...July 25, 2014
Buzz Aldrin's selfie and a bonsai tree in space the week in art
Edinburgh art festival
This energetic art festival once again brings commissions, exhibitions and projects to venues all over Edinburgh. This year explores global art, as Glasgow hosts the Commonwealth Games. Shilpa Gupta, Shannon Te Ao and Emma Rushton are among the artists in Where Do I End and You Begin, a large international group show at the City Art Centre that is the festival's central focus.
Various venues, from 31 July to 31 August. Where Do I End and You Begin is at City Art Centre, Edinburgh, from 1 August until 19 October.
July 24, 2014
Top 10 artistic talents lost in the first world war
The top 10 swimmers in art
The top 10 crime scenes in art
The 10 most shocking performance artworks
This brilliant expressionist painter captured the excitement of the young 20th century in shards and streaks of fiery colour as he reimagined nature through visionary eyes. But he was killed on the western front aged 36, and modern art lost a giant in the making.
German, died 1916
July 23, 2014
Digging up trouble: beware the curse of King Tutankhamun
Ancient Egypt fever: 'Tutmania' strikes the UK in pictures
The curse of Tutankhamun first struck in February 1923. The previous November, the intrepid archaeologist Howard Carter and his sponsor Lord Carnarvon discovered the burial chamber of a forgotten boy-king hidden in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, untouched by robbers and stuffed with treasures.
They were soaking up the press attention as Tutankhamun, forgotten for millennia, suddenly became world famous and so did his discoverers.
Continue reading...July 22, 2014
There's life out there: the artist sending bonsai trees into space
Azuma Makoto has created a completely unprecedented set of landscape images that show organic life on the edge of space.
Working with JP Aerospace, the Tokyo artist has sent a bonsai tree, orchids, lilies and other plants into the stratosphere, suspended in a balloon.
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