Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 223
June 10, 2014
Antony Gormley's £2,500 Room without a view review
The wrath of Antony Gormley is terrible to behold. As we sit on a rooftop terrace Mayfair, in London, he berates my "rudeness" and reels off some of the nasty things I have written about his art. I stop him before he can get to my favourite: "he dominates and squats on British art like a lead toad."
While not exactly a lead toad, Gormley's latest sculpture, which towers over the south-west corner of the garden square where we are tensely chatting, is a crouching steel man. A cubistic man, all blocks and angles; or maybe a metallic Lego man, shining in the joyous June sun. But this colossus contains a surprise: the figure emerging from the facade of a building is just the outer shell of his new artwork. The real treat, if you can afford it, is the luxury hotel room hidden within the statue.
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June 9, 2014
Let them eat football: Rio de Janeiro's anti-World Cup street art
Brazil's anti-World Cup street art in pictures
Art is tricky to pin down. It means nothing and it means everything. Images are rarely held to account, as words are. When you say you are angry about something and why, this is a clear statement. Yet even the most vicious caricature of a politician can become a cherished image whose victim hangs it over the mantelpiece with pride. That's why Spitting Image never brought down Margaret Thatcher and Steve Bell has yet to claim a leader's head.
It is also is why street paintings that adorn walls in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, joking vividly about the World Cup will soon be shown by global television stations as part of the carnival atmosphere of the tournament. No doubt they will be juxtaposed with shots of roaring crowds and street parties, even though many of the pictures are filled with scepticism and rage.
Continue reading...British Folk Art review welcome to the old weird Britain
Queer as folk: art from Britain's magical past in pictures
It is refreshing when the worst thing you can say about an exhibition is that it ends too soon.
Tate Britain's sweep through the lost history of British popular art opens a door on a lost world of flying fish, mighty figureheads and bold quiltmaking. The art here is hilarious, beguiling and mysterious by turns, from shop signs that gaudily symbolise the wares within a huge padlock announcing a locksmith's, a giant boot that hung over a cobbler's shop to paintings of prize pigs and pictures made by a tailor from his cloth scraps.
Continue reading...June 6, 2014
Tank man, Larry Clark and Van Gogh's ear makes a comeback the week in art
Sean Scully: Kind of Red
What is it about red? Auctioneers claim that paintings with red in them always sell, so Sean Scully should be on to a good thing. In his new works, this powerful and intelligent abstract painter, whose art is reminiscent both of Frank Stella's grids and Seamus Heaney's poetic landscapes, explores the fieriest, sexiest and most vital of colours. Well, actually there's a lot of grey and black here, too, in Scully's earthy, resonant, mysterious paintings.
Timothy Taylor Gallery, London W1, from 11 June until 12 July.
June 5, 2014
The top 10 magical artworks
The top 10 unforgettable faces in art
The top 10 goddesses in art
The top 10 backs in art
Underground film-maker Kenneth Anger is a follower of English magician Aleister Crowley, and some of his films are occult rituals. The title of this late-60s classic, with music by Mick Jagger, gives the game away. It is a sensual visual orgy that attempts to achieve magical power in the real world. Now you know what Jagger's Sympathy for the Devil is about.
Continue reading...June 4, 2014
Ears to a new relic: it's a Van Gogh work to be worshipped
German museum exhibits Van Gogh's ear replica grown from relative's cells
Vincent van Gogh's ear has returned from the grave or rather, the ditch or dump where the grisly piece of flesh he severed from the side of his head in December 1888 probably ended up. Van Gogh left it at a brothel in Arles. Presumably the prostitutes chucked it out with the rubbish.
Now it has been regrown from genetic material supplied by the great-great-grandson of Vincent's brother Theo. It is on display at a museum in Germany and Diemut Strebe, the artist behind this resurrection of art's most famous missing body part, hopes to tour it to New York. Will the ear get its own seat on the plane? Will it become an art world star?
Continue reading...June 3, 2014
How China's chubby women squashed the Tiananmen Square anniversary
It's the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre this week. Of all that has happened in China and to its global status since that violent crushing of a democratic movement, perhaps the least expected phenomenon is the rise to global fame of contemporary Chinese art.
Today that art is famous as much for its criticism of China's one-party regime as for its aesthetic content. This is largely down to one man, the world's most important artist in our time, Ai Weiwei. The courage and clarity of Ai Weiwei's defiant campaigns and iconoclastic artworks have made him a thorn in the side of the state he loathes. Its attempts to silence him have only made his message stronger.
Continue reading...June 2, 2014
Can I imagine stealing a great work of art? Yes, I can. But I wouldn't
Art thieves are usually a great disappointment to anyone cherishing romantic fictional ideas of gentleman burglars or fanatical collectors. Most of the best-known art thefts of recent years are connected with gangland. Paintings from Munch's Scream to Rembrandt's Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee were taken not by art-lovers, but career criminals on the look-out for forms of underworld collateral.
Patrick Vialaneix appears to be an exception. This French unemployed technician turned up at a police station earlier this year to confess to the theft of Child with a Soap Bubble, a painting often attributed to Rembrandt, from a museum near Cannes in 1999.
Continue reading...The Thai protesters' Hunger Games salute shows a lack of political thought | Jonathan Jones
The crowd have their arms held out in unison, each hand forming a three-finger salute. The concrete and steel architecture of power surrounds them but they are as one in their arcane gesture of freedom.
Arcane, that is, if you are not following The Hunger Games.
Continue reading...June 1, 2014
Gallery A: the secret museum inside the National Gallery
Up until now it has been something of a secret space known only to the National Gallery's most dedicated visitors and the odd Time Lord.
But this week the refurbished Gallery A, a little-known museum within a museum, will open at the National Gallery.
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