Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 220
July 9, 2014
The night a football match in Brazil reached the heights of tragic theatre | Jonathan Jones
Their anguished faces and tortured bodies tell of some terrible disaster. Men cry without shame. Children weep as they have never wept before not like they might cry after a fight on the playground, but with a new and terrible feeling of loss. A woman's hand becomes a claw of pain and rage and sorrow, her face a mask of lamentation.
Yet the Brazilians who were photographed unleashing their sorrow on a cloudy, darkening evening, in scenes of anguish from Estádio Mineirão to Copacabana beach, were not mourning a massacre, atrocity or anything else that might seem to justify such infinite sadness. They were merely shocked by their football team's 7-1 defeat by Germany in the World Cup semi-final.
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July 8, 2014
Matisse: can you spot the fake?
Matisse painting stolen from museum in Venezuela returns 10 years later
What makes a real Matisse better than a fake? What makes any original work or art more valuable and special than a copy?
In 2002, Odalisque in Red Trousers, a sensual and lovely painting by Matisse hanging in the Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art, was discovered to be a fake. The real painting had been stolen. It seems that no visitor, guard or curator noticed it had been replaced with a copy for quite some time. When the anomaly was finally discovered, 14 other works supposedly in the museum's collection were also reported unaccounted for.
Continue reading...July 7, 2014
The artist who took a 'slum vacation' to Thailand's biggest shanty town
Art has a special relationship with money. As the latest art sales show, contemporary art is a coveted luxury item. It is collected by people who have supervillain yachts and help to fund the Tory party.
Can today's plutocrat art say anything about poverty? Artist Phil America (yes he's American) has had a go. Recently, America moved to Klong Toey, Thailand's largest slum, and employed a local carpenter to create him a "typical" slum dwelling a tiny one-room shack. He lived in it and "interacted" with fellow slum-dwellers.
Continue reading...July 4, 2014
Rolf Harris, Pussy Drones and bad tech-tattoos the week in art
Liverpool Biennial
A "dazzle ship" that pays homage to the modernist camouflage invented during the first world war, a new composition by Michael Nyman in memory of the Hillsborough tragedy and the not-quite contemporary James McNeill Whistler are among the highlights of this summer-long art festival on Merseyside.
Various Liverpool venues, from 5 July until 26 October.
Radical Geometry review South American art to set your mind free
As you look through Jesús Soto's Nylon Cube its blue, black and silver filaments chop up your perceptions to create a dazzling, discombobulating kaleidoscope that changes as you walk around it. I found myself unable to stop circling Soto's magic cube, delighted by the new world I saw there.
New worlds abound in this marvellous exhibition. In 1936 the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia turned the map of South America upside down to declare that from now on south was north and everything was going to be different. In the decades to come, a heady cocktail of revolutionary politics and avant-garde experiment turned Montevideo, Buenos Aires and other Latin American cities into utopian laboratories of modern art.
Continue reading...July 3, 2014
Death trap: why a metal band are suffocating in a box as art
In João Onofre's latest artwork, Box Sized Die featuring Unfathomable Ruination, the death metal band get inside a steel cube. It is sealed shut, and they play until the oxygen runs out.
The band is then released, but clearly this work of art flirts with the possibility of death by suffocation. Well, they do play "unrelenting brutal death metal" according to their website. I suppose they are just putting their beliefs into practice.
Continue reading...July 2, 2014
The 10 best beds in art
Tracey Emin's Bed is sold at auction for more than £2.5m
The bed on which Manet's prostitute reclines is a glittering array of complicated swags of off-white linen. Just as his portrayal of Olympia is harsher and more real that the traditional nudes his painting mocks, so her bed is a parody of the luxurious beds on which Titian and Velazquez displayed their beauties.
Continue reading...I saw Rolf Harris's dark side when I questioned his portrait of the Queen
Long before Rolf Harris was convicted of 12 counts of indecent assault, including one against a girl aged seven or eight, I got a minor glimpse of his now notorious dark side.
I was sent to the press unveiling of his portrait of the Queen at her Buckingham Palace art gallery in 2005, at the height of his success when his Rolf on Art programmes had become the flagship of popular art history on the BBC ("Can you see what it is yet? It's Monet's waterlily pond ...")
Continue reading...July 1, 2014
The slice of genius brought to you by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Roald Dahl
The really big financial killing at Christie's auction of Postwar and Contemporary Art in London this week will not be made by Tracey Emin's My Bed. Instead it will involve a famous children's author and two remarkable painters, as Francis Bacon's Study for Head of Lucian Freud (1967) also goes under the hammer.
A portrait of the brilliant Freud by his peer or superior? Francis Bacon is bound to attract some sensational bids. After all, Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud currently holds the world record as the most expensive painting ever sold at auction after it fetched $142m at Christie's in New York last year. Another Bacon triptych, of his lover George Dyer, sold at Sotheby's this week for £26.7m.
Continue reading...June 30, 2014
What is the painting of Charles Saatchi throttling Nigella Lawson really saying?
When photographs of Charles Saatchi apparently throttling Nigella Lawson were published in 2013, the public outrage they unleashed left the former Conservative party advertising man vilified and divorced. Saatchi is now best known as a celebrity chef's former husband and as a man who was violent towards a woman in public.
It must come almost as a relief to him to be mocked as the man who "throttles" the art world.
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