Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 224
May 30, 2014
Naomi Campbell, Tracey Emin and the true owner of 'nothing' the week in art
Summer Show
I hate it, but it never goes away, and it is a link with history. The sprawl of this show, where famous RAs rub shoulders with dedicated artists of less fame but huge variety, is always a crowd-puller. It continues a tradition that goes back to the 18th century, and a way of looking at art that is more open-minded than today's hypercharged curated exhibitions. So perhaps I am wrong perhaps this is a great event after all. Then again, I always say that before seeing it.
Royal Academy, London W1J from 9 June until 17 August
Contemporary art isn't original even copying has been done before | Jonathan Jones
"Good artists copy, great artists steal," said Pablo Picasso. Or at least he gets the credit for saying it. Perhaps he pinched the words from Oscar Wilde. For there truly is nothing new under the sun, or not entirely new, anyway. Originality does not burst from an artist's head like an alien entity, but is a subtle game of variations and transformations out of which, once in a while, comes the shudder of true artistic surprise.
A group of art intellectuals who have questioned the originality of a performance to be staged by Marina Abramovi at the Serpentine Gallery this summer has strayed into very silly territory. They are wrong about the very nature of art, and the way it changes through time; its history. This is bizarre, because the people making the fuss are professional art historians. They insist Abramovi should acknowledge a previous work by the American artist Mary Ellen Carroll, which they say has a prior claim to her chosen theme. In a surreal twist that theme happens to be "nothing".
Continue reading...May 29, 2014
The top 10 backs in art
The top 10 unforgettable faces in art
The top 10 goddesses in art
The top 10 monsters in art
This is a masterpiece of the Japanese erotic art genre known as Shunga. A woman with her lover has her back to us, clad in a kimono. With this subtle and sympathetic pose, Utamaro lets us into a private moment while also intensifying the mystery and self-possession of the woman with the gracious back.
Continue reading...Why art and opera make such passionate bedfellows
Art and opera have gone together ever since the first operatic spectacles were staged in Renaissance Italy. Opera is by definition a multimedia entertainment that brings together the visual with music. But in the heightened romantic world of operatic storytelling, artists are also liable to turn up as characters.
After all, their lives are so intense, so risky, so egotistical ... so operatic.
Continue reading...May 28, 2014
Anatomical Barbie is woman-hating nonsense not art
From My Little Boney to Core Bear: creepy skeletal toys in pictures
What is art, right now? You get one answer from a museum such as Tate Modern and another from looking across the vast buzzing panorama of contemporary news media. Everyone agrees that art can, today, be practically anything. Yet while the official art world takes that to mean, say, an installation of the lights going off, popular culture is full of stuff from sand sculptures to portraits made of bacteria that get labelled as art. The latest example of such globally celebrated instant culture is a collection of anatomical models based on Barbie dolls and other famous toys.
New York-based artist Jason Freeny makes sculptures of Barbie that have their insides exposed to reveal so goes the hype the anatomic impossibility of this wasp-waisted doll. With her internal organs crushed together, Barbie is shown to be a dangerously impossible role model.
Continue reading...May 27, 2014
Michelangelo Pistoletto: the artist with a smashing way to save the world
How many years' bad luck is this? Artist Michelangelo Pistoletto smashes mirrors with a sledgehammer video
It's a Thursday lunchtime and Michelangelo Pistoletto's cafe is buzzing. All around me, people are chatting, eating and laughing as they sit at wooden tables in this stylishly stripped-back space. Pistoletto, one of the most celebrated artists in Europe, has joined me for antipasti, along with his wife Maria and, for some reason, their very entertaining dentist, who is telling me how he got a free delivery of berries yesterday after helping an old man who had got lost in the street.
Pistoletto, a visionary figure who believes artists have a mission to change the world, jokes that our antipasti are tantamount to arte povera food their simple and honest ingredients reflecting the philosophies of the revolutionary artistic and social movement he launched way back in the 1960s. I tuck into my roasted carrots, stuffed courgettes and octopus, washing it all down with a good Piedmont wine. If this is utopianism, bring me more. And look! Here comes the panna cotta.
Continue reading...Little house on the moon: is space the artworld's final frontier?
In space, no one can hear you criticise art. No one can touch it or see it either, except an occasional visiting astronaut, a powerful telescope, or aliens. And yet, space is art's final frontier.
In 2002, Damien Hirst sent a painting into space. It was a miniature example of his expensive, multicoloured spot paintings. But Beagle 2, the British attempt to make a mark on Mars and was carrying Hirst's artwork lost contact before it ever landed on the red planet, and was presumably destroyed. Perhaps it's just as well that the aliens did not get their first impression of human beings from a Damien Hirst painting. (Unless, of course, they seized Beagle 2 and, after seeing how rubbish our art is, called off their planned invasion.)
Continue reading...May 26, 2014
Why New York's Metropolitan museum is leader of the free world of art
If only Britain had a place like New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. This great compendium of art and culture on the edge of Central Park is about to rebuild its modern wing in other words, to improve on what is already an unrivalled cocktail of past and present. Meanwhile it has just launched so much of its collection for free download that its website temporarily crashed under the pressure of public excitement.
No other great museum has the Metropolitan's range. Its name is appropriate for it turns the whole world, across all time, into one buzzing city. You can stroll from an Egyptian temple to a Renaissance studiolo, from a roomful of Rembrandts to an encounter with Jackson Pollock.
Continue reading...May 23, 2014
Glasgow School of Art: heart of British renaissance in visual creativity
In Alasdair Gray's classic modern Scottish novel Lanark, a student at Glasgow School of Art in the 1950s becomes obsessed with painting frescos for his melancholic, declining city.
Gray's partly autobiographical fiction brings the school to life, not just as one of the most beautiful buildings in Britain comparable with Gaudi's masterpieces in Barçelona but as a place of fervent, youthful idealism and intense, high-pressure creativity. In the 1990s and since, this very palpable creative atmosphere made GSA one of the centres of a renaissance in British visual creativity.
Continue reading...Ai Weiwei, paint ejaculations and prehistoric farts the week in art
Richard Jackson
Paint machines, mechanical toys, kitsch sculpture and wild ejaculations of squidgy, oily, arty colours all over the place are the frolicsome style of this subversive Los Angeles-based painter. Jackson turns painting into clowning. This exhibition should be a riot.
Hauser and Wirth, London W1S until 26 July
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