Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 229

Thierry Noir: the first graffiti artist fired up by the Berlin Wall

Monstrous as the Wall was, it offered artists like Noir and musicians like Bowie a dark subject matter that is lacking in safe consumerist societies

Graffiti in the death strip: the Berlin wall's first street artist tells his story

Has culture ever recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall? Seriously. The division of Berlin and state surveillance endured by people trapped in the eastern half of the city was the most visible and symbolic anguish of the cold war. The end of the Wall in 1989 was a sunny day for humanity. But in its monstrous strangeness, this scar running through a city had provided artists, novelists, musicians and film-makers with a dark subject matter and surreal inspiration so often lacking in the safe, consumerist world of the postwar democracies.

A retrospective of work by the graffiti artist Thierry Noir that opens on 4 April at the Howard Griffin Gallery in Shoreditch, east London, transports the visitor back to Berlin in the last days of the Wall. In the 1980s, Noir became the first artist to daub the long, bleak expanse of the Wall, starting a movement that is today one of the most famous things about the structure. His blocky cartoon paintings have become part of the mythology of the Wall, and appear in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire.

Why are the nerves of empathy severed when it comes to immigration? | Jonathan Jones

That the Daily Mail can print this picture confident it will not make people want to help these men is a distortion of Britain

Men are running behind a truck, trying to jump up and grab on to it, so they can hitch an illegal lift into Britain. It's a self-evidently dangerous game. Like the "super-tramps" in Depression-era America who jumped on and off moving goods trains to get from city to city, these migrants are risking life and limb in search of a better life, or at least another place to be poor in.

Eighty years on, who fails to feel sympathy for the victims of economic and political world turmoil in the 1930s who left their homes or were driven to the adventurous lifestyle described by WH Davies in his Autobiography of a Super-Tramp? Perhaps one day these truck-jumpers will be celebrated as heroes or mourned as victims. But right now there is little compassion for those who come across a continent or a world in search of a life in Britain: no curiosity about motives, no pity for need, no recognition of potential.

Robert Mapplethorpe: Paris welcomes an erotic great thanks to Patti Smith

This photographer once dismissed as a shallow sensation-seeker of the 80s is getting the recognition he deserves with a show at the Grand Palais, Paris's high temple of art and it's all down to Smith

The Grand Palais in Paris is one of Europe's most serious exhibition spaces. It is where France honours its great artists. This week, it opened a big exhibition dedicated to a US artist who has often been dismissed as a shallow sensation-seeker of the 1980s. Why is Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989, getting this high-level retrospective now? Does he deserve it?

The fate of artists after their deaths is often a surprise. The name on the artworld's lips may suddenly fade. Or an artist once severely criticised such as Mappethorpe may come to be recognised more and more simply as a creator of a unique kind of beauty. How this process happens can depend on a lot of things even love.

Toy Stories: photographic proof that childhood has been commodified

Fascinating images of children with their toys Pavel with his plastic guns, Mchinji and her dinosaur show that an epidemic of mass-produced play is spreading around the globe

Child's play: kids from Alaska to Zambia pose with their favourite toys in pictures

Looking at Gabriele Galimberti's photographs of children from a globetrotting project called Toy Stories feels like intruding on private worlds. Play is a realm of mystery and adventure. Toys come alive in a child's imagination. It's a brave or clumsy adult who crashes in on this rich reality. What are you playing? What's your favourite toy? What does it signify? Such adult questions, such adult photographs.

The children are posed like grownups in an ironic magazine spread about taste and yet what they are showing off is the stuff of childhood.

The top 10 drinkers in art

From Bacchus weaving his spell in a Spanish street to Gilbert and George getting gradually drunk on Gordon's, here's our pick of pieces in which booze plays a key part

The top 10 sexiest artworks ever
The 10 weirdest artworks ever
The 10 most criminal artists ever

In this ironic masterpiece, the Spanish painter whose career took him from portraying the street life of 17th-century Seville to painting the king in Madrid and the pope in Rome edgily juxtaposes myth and reality, high art and low life. Like a modern conceptual photographic artwork (except done in magnificent oil paints), it imagines that the ancient god Bacchus has come to earth in early-modern Spain. Instead of the satyrs and maenads who follow him in the old stories, Bacchus is surrounded by scruffy boozers. The myth of wine as cultural aspiration meets the reality of drink as an escape from poverty.

Don't be dazzled: why redecorating first world war ships is so cowardly

Two battleships are to be repainted by contemporary artists in the 'dazzle' camouflage of 1914-18. Isn't this a disturbingly celebratory way to remember a monstrous war?

The first world war, it was just like the Olympics. It brought so many people together. Admittedly, they came together to die "like cattle", as the poet Wilfred Owen put it a bit grumpily but what a moving occasion nonetheless. It deserves to be marked by another Cultural Olympiad.

Perhaps I am exaggerating the happy-clappy banality of the cultural events planned to mark this year's centenary of the first world war's outbreak, but a remark actually made by Maria Miller, secretary of state for culture, media and sport, at the launch is not far off: "The first world war had such a great deal of culture associated with it from the poets to visual artists "

Antique photographs show the history of race in black and white

From a white man in 'blackface' to a black Union soldier and an am-dram society dressed as a lynch mob, Mirror of Race's collection reveals a forgotten world of US race relations

Shocking images from America's race war in pictures

Early photography is more than a window on history. It is an uncanny and disturbing encounter with real people, the light reflected off their faces falling on chemically sensitised surfaces long ago.

The camera has been around now for nearly two centuries. Yet photographs from the 19th century have the same punch as pictures taken digitally today. We are not seeing mere pictures of people, but a trace of the people themselves, as they looked in life.

Neurone: meet the world's first sentient chameleon artwork

A new interactive array of LEDs and sensors will respond to your movements and change colour to match your skin tone. But is it art, science or gimmick?

The world's first work of art that can respond to your presence post all quibbles below if you invented something similar five years ago is being unveiled tonight at the new Furnace Park in Sheffield.

Neurone, designed by Nate Adams, a research scientist in the University of Sheffield's department of molecular biology and biotechnology, is an interactive creation that lights up and changes colour in response to your location and activities. Put your hand in a glowing box and it changes colour like a chameleon to match your skin tones. Walk around and Neurone responds to your motion. It does all kinds of cool stuff of that ilk.

Nan Goldin and Lady Gaga's vomit artist the week in art

The queen of hardcore photography bares all about her druggy past, as the queen of vomit art defends her craft all in your fave weekly dispatch

Edmund de Waal
Can ceramics be art? Edmund de Waal makes the answer seem obvious. His minimalist displays of coolly beautiful ceramic objects seductively straddle the old gap between art and craft. Modernism and ancient influences elegantly combine in art at once beautiful and thought-provoking.
Turner Contemporary, Margate CT9, from 29 March until 8 February 2015.

Howard Hodgkin: 'Once I stop painting, they should start measuring my coffin'

He may be in his 80s and in need of a wheelchair to get about, but Howard Hodgkin still paints with staggering power. Jonathan Jones meets a 'living master'

A brush with Howard: a rare glimpse inside Hodgkin's studio in pictures

Howard Hodgkin sits in a wheelchair in his studio. Light falls through the glass roof on to big boards propped against white-washed brick walls. One by one, his studio assistant starts moving them to reveal a glistening array of new paintings. It seems banal to call them beautiful but that's what they are.

"When I was young," says Hodgkin reassuringly, "I used to mind people describing my pictures as beautiful. I don't any more." Why did he mind? "I used to think that it meant the subject was neither here nor there."