Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 226
May 13, 2014
Why Tate Modern should show Rothko a little respect
Tate Modern unveils painstakingly restored Rothko
It's a red letter day or a black on maroon one anyway. Mark Rothko's Black on Maroon, vandalised at Tate Modern in 2012, has at last gone on view again. It was clearly a serious attack, for the restoration has been slow and difficult. Now everyone is happy. Rothko's family praise the Tate restorers for their dedicated work. One of the most powerful modern paintings in Britain has returned to the light. Hooray.
But has the Tate thought at all about why the attack happened, and has it considered for a second can it bring itself to ask if the less than conventional atmosphere of Tate Modern as an art museum may encourage a lack of reverence for its art? After all, it's not long since some children were spotted using its Donald Judd as a climbing frame. Is that so surprising when Tate Modern is famous for presenting slides as art?
Continue reading...
May 12, 2014
Survival of the funkiest: does culture adhere to Darwinian law?
There were some funky beats at Imperial College London on Saturday at its annual science festival. As well as opportunities to create bogeys, see robots dance and try to get physics PhD students to explain their wacky world, this fascinating event included the chance to participate in a public game-like experiment called DarwinTunes.
Participants select tunes and "mate" them with other tunes to create musical offspring: if the offspring are in turn selected by other players, they "survive" and get the chance to reproduce their musical DNA. The experiment is online you too can try to immortalise your selfish musical genes.
Continue reading...May 9, 2014
The Turner prize baffles and Ukip gets Bill Drummonded the week in art
Otto Dix
This great and shocking artist's furious depictions of the first world war replace this year's memory-fest with something more biting, truthful and relevant to our time.
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea TN40, 17 May until 27 July.
May 8, 2014
The top 10 unforgettable faces in art
The top 10 sexiest artworks
The top 10 criminal artists
The top 10 surrealist artworks
The lost, sad, daydreaming face of the barmaid in Manet's painting of Paris nightlife is the mask of a modern woman. She's alienated from her surroundings and trying to ignore the sleazy clientele who is that sinister man in the mirror? as she endures her shift. Work is anonymous exploitation, gender relations are dangerous and the city a heartless glittering nightclub in Manet's vision. You can see it all in that face.
Continue reading...May 7, 2014
This burnt-out car in eastern Ukraine is a gravestone of peace
This photograph of a burnt-out car on a road near Semyonovka village, near Slavyansk, blazes with foreboding about the future of Ukraine.
It is a truly menacing picture. The sky has turned dark. Iron-grey clouds blacken with the promise of a coming storm. Nature itself seems to be prophesying the all-out war that observers of a deteriorating crisis fear. But it is the destroyed car that speaks most awfully of horrors real and anticipated. Its front is an almost unrecognisable mess of exposed mechanical viscera, browned by fire; a melange of metal the colour of dried blood.
Continue reading...May 6, 2014
Past perfect: why the best modern art shows its primitive roots
Blurred lines: Josef Albers' rare black and white drawings in pictures
The most advanced art of the 20th and 21st centuries has one eye constantly looking back at the earliest and most primal human creations.
A new exhibition about Josef Albers, the Bauhaus teacher and master of the abstract square, at London's Waddington Custot Galleries is a case in point. As well as designing works of cool geometrical clarity, Albers took powerful photographs. His images find intimations of the abstract in the real world: sharp lines, bold angles, cutting shadows.
Continue reading...May 2, 2014
Retro Lego kits for adults are fine but don't block kids' creativity
Lego consoles and classic computers in pictures
Lego is the marble of the modern era. In the Renaissance, worlds were created from stone. In the 21st century we can build anything out of Lego and you don't have to be Michelangelo to put the little bricks together.
Consider Lego artist Chris McVeigh's website, where you can download plans to build some very quirky Lego creations. McVeigh specialises in retro technology: he's designed Lego models of old-fashioned TVs, Polaroids, NES consoles and out-of-date computers including the Mac Classic.
Continue reading...Van Gogh in Brixton and David Hockney's heart the week in art
David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring
There are intriguing contrasts and unexpected similarities between the simplest means and the most sophisticated technology in Hockney's latest exhibition of modern plein air landscapes. He shows charcoal drawings alongside iPad sketches: the stark light and shadow of the traditional drawings beside the synthesised colours of art made on a machine. But the same hand and eye shaped both. And, as Hockney would insist, the same heart.
Annely Juda Fine Art, London W1S, from 8 May until 12 July.
April 30, 2014
The top 10 artworks of the 20th century
The top 10 male nudes in art
The top 10 females nudes in art
The top 10 surrealist artworks
The top 10 drinkers in art
The 20th century began with a man painting a mountain. Cézanne's ultimate masterpieces of the 1900s pick apart the process of looking and reveal the infinite complexity of experience. Each brushstroke contains a novel. The intellectual revolutions of the modern age, from Freud to Einstein, all find their mirror in the tough revolutionary eye of Cézanne.
Continue reading...April 29, 2014
Honouring Sasha the dog is a grand example of human generosity | Jonathan Jones
Animals cannot really be "gallant". They cannot be cowardly either. Neither can they hate, murder, torture or campaign for peace. All these, like war itself, are unique to humans.
That has not stopped an organisation called the PDSA giving its Dickin medal posthumously to Sasha the labrador, who was killed by a Taliban ambush in Afghanistan along with her handler, Lance Corporal Kenneth Rowe, in July 2008. They were on patrol searching for explosive devices when they were shot.
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
