Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 227
April 29, 2014
Why everyone's wrong about Tate Britain's problems
The Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak recently called for Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, to go. Not just to change her approach to exhibitions, but actually to depart. Today the Telegraph's critic Richard Dorment responds. He insists that Curtis has done a brilliant job in rehanging the permanent collection at Tate Britain. She's also picked up the backing of the Art Fund, which has included Tate Britain on its Museum of the Year shortlist.
They are all wrong. Dorment and the Art Fund are in denial. Tate Britain is nobody's favourite museum. It has deep-seated problems. Yet, equally, Januszczak is wrong to blame them exclusively on Curtis, or to think her departure would change things.
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April 25, 2014
Buildings by Michelangelo, carrots by Krut the week in art
Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting Renaissance architecture imagines ideal worlds. The geometrical domes and airy loggias of its classical revival are maps of utopian spaces. Artists aspired to create such architecture Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael all designed buildings. Imagined architecture also fills and gives structure to Renaissance paintings. To walk through the National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing is to see virtual worlds of seductive architecture painted by the likes of Antonello da Messina and Sandro Botticelli. This exhibition explores this strangely contemporary aspect of the Renaissance for virtual space and mathematical perspective are returning to the centre of culture in the digital age. Past, present and the fantastic meet in what should be a mind-opening show. National Gallery, London WC2N from 30 April until 21 September
Continue reading...Andy Warhol's Amiga art confirms him as a true hero for our digital age
It had to happen. Andy Warhol's experiments in digital art have been rediscovered. Of course they have how could the most prophetic artist of the 20th century have missed out on the birth struggles of the 21st?
Warhol wrote the blueprint for our time. He knew that everyone was going to be famous for 15 minutes and that, as a consequence, fame would melt into banality. He could see that art would become as easy to make as taking a Polaroid, that portraiture would give way to the democracy of the selfie as he demonstrated in photo-booth portraits taken as early as the 1960s.
Continue reading...April 24, 2014
Why sex should never be whitewashed from the art world
Is it merely prurient to want to know who a famous artist slept with? I don't think so. Personally I love to know what made the masters tick, and by tick, I mean get aroused. Many people see this kind of curiosity as superficial, sensationalist and irrelevant to the higher world that is art. I've even been told I see the Renaissance as a "pornotopia".
It seems trendy in conventional biographies to deny that artists slept with their models. We should not leap to conclusions just because their art seems massively sensual. That's why writer Hilary Spurling insists that Matisse never jumped into bed with the women he painted with such nakedly erotic pleasure, while Andrew Graham Dixon denies Caravaggio was gay just because he painted men with fleshly fascination.
Continue reading...April 23, 2014
The top 10 crime scenes in art
The top 10 drinkers in art
The top 10 female nudes in art
The top 10 male nudes in art
The top 10 weirdest artworks ever
The crime in this troubling work of art is not being perpetrated by "rioters", but by the police. As demonstrators take to the streets for civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama, a police officer deliberately sets a dog on an unarmed man. So this photographic image is evidence. Warhol, so often seen as a heartless observer of celebrity and sleaze, carefully chose it and turned it into a print to make that evidence permanent, indelible, unforgettable.
Continue reading...April 22, 2014
The Kelpies: why Scotland's new public art is just a pile of horse poo
Scotland has unveiled the latest misbegotten "masterpiece" of public art. It is big. It is bold. And it is rotten.
Glasgow's Andy Scott is the artist responsible for the Kelpies, a sculpture of colossal Clydesdale horse heads that tower 30 metres over Helix Park, Falkirk, near the M9 motorway. What for? For "regeneration", of course. It is claimed the £5m, 300-tonne sculptures will bring in £1.5m a year through guided tours providing enough people mistake them for a worthwhile work of art.
Continue reading...The artist who lays eggs with her vagina or why performance art is so silly
Performance art is a joke. Taken terribly seriously by the art world, it is a litmus test of pretension and intellectual dishonesty. If you are wowed by it, you are either susceptible to pseudo-intellectual guff, or lying.
Is that overstating the case? Probably. There have been some powerful works of performance art but most of them took place a long time ago, in the early 1970s, when the likes of Marina Abramovic and Chris Burden were risking all. Or perhaps the golden age of performance art was even longer ago, in the days of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916. Back then, Dada performance was a real menace to society, when Hugo Ball stood in a wizard costume declaiming words that made as little sense as the world war then raging.
Continue reading...April 18, 2014
Why the best Easter art is so gory and disturbing
The art of Easter is gory and profound. If Christmas is the season of angels, stables and wise men bearing gifts, Easter in art is the time of suffering, death and resurrection.
It doesn't matter what you believe in or don't. The story of Christ's passion has inspired some of the greatest artists to create their most serious works. Of all the rituals that marked the pre-modern year in Christian Europe, this was the time for the darkest meditations and most intense hopes.
Continue reading...April 15, 2014
The top 10 female nudes in art
The top 10 male nudes in art
The 10 sexiest artworks ever
The 10 most surreal artworks
No one has ever painted naked women as gorgeously as Titian did. His ravishing Venus is a lover laying her beauty bare, and the recipient of her optical largesse is anyone who happens to stand in front of this painting in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy. Titian creates with mind-boggling skill the lavish presence of this nude: the rapture of her carnal glory. There's something divine about such beauty. Some people find profundity in religious art, in abstract art, in conceptual art. For me, there's nothing more moving in art than the breasts of the Venus of Urbino.
Continue reading...April 14, 2014
New Banksy? Whatever. Graffiti is just a tame in-joke for Guardian readers
Once graffiti was a guttural art. It was rude and threatening. Respectable people abhorred it. Artists like Jean Dubuffet found "raw" beauty in it.
Now it is a tame in-joke shared by a middle class so schooled in street art that homeowners are delighted to wake up with a daub on the side of their house if they think it may be a valuable Banksy. "It's pretty good," said Karren Smith of Cheltenham this week when she saw what was painted on her home overnight: a bunch of spooks from nearby GCHQ setting up a phone tap on a public phonebox.
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