Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 252

Do critics paint women artists out the picture?

Bridget Riley, not David Hockney, is Britain's greatest living painter, but an ingrained prejudice against female greatness puts a glass ceiling on the pantheon as well as the boardroom

Is there a glass ceiling for women in the arts? When it comes to visual art, a superficial glance by a visiting alien would see 21st-century Britain as one of the best places and times there has ever been for women working as artists. I went to Rome for my holidays. I gorged on paintings, frescoes and statues, from ancient Roman mosaics to Canova nudes. None of these great works of art of ages gone by are credited to women – which doesn't mean there were no women artists at all before modern times. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder lists women artists. The Renaissance writer Giorgio Vasari also praises a handful of women. But art was organised as a male-only craft and women could only sidestep the guild system under exceptional circumstances, such as being the daughter of a painter, like the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi.

The exclusion of women from art was a holocaust of talent, a denial of half the human imagination. That's over. Modern art appeared at the same women campaigned for the vote. In Britain, the contemporary art boom that started in the late 1980s has – apparently – seen as many women as men become famous. Compare the art world of Tracey Emin with the art world of Artemisia Gentileschi and it's obvious a lot has changed.

Or has it?

There is still a glass ceiling when it comes to recognition. Women are no longer prevented by a guild system from actually training as artists. But they are consistently denied the ultimate accolades of fame and respect. There's an image of supreme excellence in art that still, somehow, assumes a male bloodline of the greats.

Who is Britain's greatest living painter? David Hockney, perhaps? Frank Auerbach? No, it's Bridget Riley. And let's not forget Paula Rego.

In fact, the best artists of modern Britain – the most serious, original and likely to be the most enduring – are chiefly women, including Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas and Tacita Dean.

All these women get recognition, but not enough, and not the right kind. The sense of greatness is still deeply patriarchal. The bad guys are us, the critics. For art criticism is still a very male profession with very male values. The critic looks for an image of authority and profundity in art and tends to put male names, male faces to that image. Why? Millennia of prejudice. A deeply ingrained sense that genius is gendered makes it feel strange, almost, to me, to state the fact that Riley is greater than Hockney. To understand that reluctance is to see the invisible walls that keep the pantheon as male as the boardroom.

Bridget RileyPaula RegoRachel WhitereadSarah LucasTacita DeanPaintingArtWomenEqualityJonathan Jones
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Edward Snowden: 21st-century revolutionary icon?

He may not have the romance of Che Guevara, but the whistleblower is a fitting poster hero for our times

What makes a radical icon? Edward Snowden may not look (in spite of this mockup) much like Che Guevara or exhibit the revolutionary hero's flair for posing with berets, cigars and golf clubs, but that has not discouraged entrepreneurs in Russia and China from bidding for the rights to put the elusive whistleblower's face on T-shirts and posters. They appear to think his bespectacled, serious visage can become the Guevaresque image of subversion for our time. Are they right?

Revolutionary heroes don't have to look like Che to make it as poster boys. Karl Marx was a bookish gent with a huge bushy beard but that has not stopped his image decorating many a student bedroom down the years. Even Arthur Scargill once had his admirers. Compared with them, Edward Snowden has many of the conventional properties of a pop-culture icon.

He's young. He undeniably looks idealistic, which is exciting. In the images in global circulation, grabbed from a Guardian video, he avoids the one facial expression that might undermine his enigma: he doesn't smile. Pale and committed, he looks like someone who has made a dangerous resolution, as he has. It was reported that while at Moscow airport he read Dostoevsky to pass the time. Of course he did. Dostoevsky's troubled modern novels mirror the aura of passionate intensity Snowden projects.

Snowden is no Che – but who was Che? A fantasy figure of guerilla violence for an age that preferred its politics drugged up with romantic fantasy. Snowden is an icon for a less deluded era when the true dimensions of power are more apparent and the true risks of dissent more sombrely visible.

To fight the power today you need a laptop, not Che's gun, and the skills and intelligence to outwit a vast surveillance state. Snowden looks like that guy, because he is that guy. A T-shirt hero? Why not?

Edward SnowdenNSAUnited StatesUS national securityChe GuevaraJonathan Jones
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The royal baby pictures show privilege trying, and failing, to look normal | Jonathan Jones

William and Kate's middle-class make-believe with George is no more authentic than Marie Antoinette dressing as a shepherdess

Say cheese! The smiles of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge say it all in their first official photographs with Prince George.

Those grins say, for a start, that we are looking at an amateur photograph. No professional asks people to beam for their portraits in the toothy way the royal parents do as they pose on a lawn with their baby and a handsome dog. The photographer is the happy mum's father, Michael Middleton. Picture editors and photographers have praised his work, as the unstoppable flood of sycophancy unleashed by the royal birth continues to sweep away sanity and proportion.

These are plainly amateur pictures: the Raphaelesque triangular composition (completed by the dog) is as innocent and old-fashioned as any moderately skilled enthusiast with a decent camera might manage under similar circumstances. This unmistakable ordinariness gives the photo its democratic charm. Here is the royal lineage of Britain, with a claim to the throne enshrined by centuries of pomp and circumstance, pictured like a middle class English family in the garden on a summer day. The happiness of the parents is so spontaneous and normal. The sentimentality we naturally share about babies is being exploited by the British monarchy to an embarrassing degree. But the trouble with the new royalism is that it is far more dishonest than the old royalism. This picture, with its amateur touches, gives that away.

I can't stop looking at those teeth. How they shine. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge may pose as totally average people, they may even think they are totally average people, but if they don't care about image, why the Hollywood teeth? In this picture everything is manicured, including the vast empty lawn. It's not an image of ordinariness but of the new elite of David Cameron's Britain who dress, relax and smile with an unostentatious confidence that's actually born of huge financial security.

And for all its attempts to look natural, it is posed: for the royal family is not middle class. The royal couple playing at "normal" parenthood is no more authentic than Marie Antoinette dressed as a shepherdess. The interesting question is why is such obvious fiction taken seriously by so many? Most of us take our own family photographs because that's the only way they will get taken. The royals have access to any star photographer going, so it is mere vanity to choose granddad to do it instead. It goes with all the other vanities of this summer's humble royal fantasy. Let's pretend we don't have an army of nannies standing by. Let's pretend the royal baby has the same life chances as every other child born in Britain. Why? Surely because this image of a lovably "ordinary" royal family is reassuring in insecure times.

The image says they are like us, but we know their happiness rests on a bedrock of massive wealth and tradition. They have nothing to worry about. So maybe if we identify with them, we have nothing to worry about either. It is anxiety that gives birth to conservatism. This is a portrait of our frightened age.

Prince GeorgeThe Duchess of CambridgePrince WilliamMonarchyPhotographyJonathan Jones
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Egypt's unrest is a crisis for art

Is the world going to stand by and watch the destruction of Egyptian antiquities that are our global inheritance?

No country on earth has a deeper relationship with tourism than Egypt. It has been a holiday-of-a-lifetime destination for westerners since Victorian times. The travel firm Thomas Cook and Sons started offering Egyptian tours in the late 19th century. Agatha Christie's novel Death on the Nile captured the mix of British tourists on a cruise in the 1930s.

The "tourist" economy in Egypt is now menaced by the chaotic aftermath of the country's revolution. No one knows how this will end. British government travel advice is to avoid much of the country except for the Red Sea resorts.

This development has been reported with no mention of culture as if the issue were purely about holidays. In fact, it reveals a crisis for art.

Many people visit Egypt to see the face of Tutankhamun in the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities in the heart of Cairo, to gaze at the Sphinx and the temples at Luxor. Ancient Egyptian art and architecture are among the greatest achievements of humanity.

If the pyramids of Giza are not safe for tourists, how safe is the pharoah's solar boat, a wooden astral craft excavated next to the pyramids and displayed beside them? If holidaymakers are being told to avoid Cairo, is there a risk to the mesmerising, irreplaceable artefacts in its museum?

This is not speculation. It has been reported that a museum in Minya on the Upper Nile has already been looted in the current unrest. According to Ahram Online, an expert committee has found the museum to be almost completely ransacked. Heavy antiquities that couldn't be moved were vandalised, it says. The missing objects are being catalogued and will be added to Unesco's Red List of stolen antiquities.

The military-backed government may have its own reasons for promoting this story (it blames the Muslim Brotherhood) but photographs of the damage and theft make it clear something destructive has happened.

If you think it's perverse to mourn a museum when hundreds of people have been killed ... think of it this way: someone who loses their memory has lost part of who they are, part of their life. To lose ancient Egypt would be to lose the collective memory of humanity. It's unthinkable.

It is time for the Art Fund, the British Museum and any other body that takes responsibility for cultural heritage to speak up for the antiquities of Egypt. This is too important to wait until the worst happens. We can start by recognising that the pyramids and sarcophagi and statues of ancient Egypt are not just for tourists but part of a global inheritance, to be kept safe for all future generations.

Middle East and North AfricaEgyptAfricaMuseumsHeritageUnescoArtJonathan Jones
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Take it to the Maxxi: why a Rome museum needs to up its game

In a city of art's wonders, Rome's Maxxi is going to have a major battle to establish itself and truly connect with the Eternal City

Rome's museum of 21st century art, Maxxi, has appointed curator and critic Hou Hanru as its artistic director. He's taking on quite a job. This gallery designed by Zaha Hadid opened to international fanfare in 2010, but it looks like it might not make it in the Eternal City.

Last year the Guardian reported that Maxxi might have to close due to a hole in its accounts. Last month, the New York Times reported on a programme of public events aimed at drawing Romans into this art temple whose costs run to millions and whose exhibitions rely heavily on sponsorship. The museum admits, says the paper, that it has a problem getting popular support.

To put it bluntly, Maxxi has not yet established itself among the wonders of Rome – and to put it even more bluntly I'm not surprised.

Who goes to Rome to see a sleek contemporary art venue – even one of real architectural merit – when there are such places everywhere from Los Angeles to Middlesbrough? Rome has so much those places will never have: California has no Sistine Chapel, Dusseldorf no churches where Caravaggios are chanced upon.

Rome has no obligation to turn itself into a trendy modern city, no need to be ashamed that its glory rests on the achievements of antiquity, the Renaissance, and the baroque.

Not that it lacks modern culture. From Pasolini's novel A Violent Life, one of the most vivid accounts of city existence ever written, to the films of Paolo Sorrentino, this city is an epic canvas of life. The trouble with Maxxi is that it has so far set its face against the gritty realities as well as the history of Rome: it was publicised when it opened as an outpost of the international art circuit, landing like a spaceship among all those dull old relics.

The new artistic director does not need to mythically plug Maxxi into some imaginary global vibe. He needs to connect it with the city. It needs to feel part of the life (and history) of Rome.

It's worth remembering that Tate Modern, the model Maxxi worships, is not a purely contemporary place. It is a reclaimed former power station, built originally in a style that aped ancient Assyria. With its location next to the Thames and close to Shakespeare's haunts, Tate Modern is very rooted in the city around it.

Maxxi so far has looked like a massive confession of cultural insecurity by a Rome desperate to keep up with the art world. That needs to change. The city that drew Cy Twombly to it has no need to be insecure. Here, the new has been born time and again from the past.

RomeArtMuseumsJonathan Jones
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New York, New York … still the capital of art world cool

Forget London – from Pollock to Rauschenberg, the best of modernism belongs to New York and always has done

London used to be cool. Artists and pop stars and fashion geniuses by the score. But that was yesterday. Art and pop have a new place to party. It's called New York.

A startling new hybrid of art and popular culture is exploding in and around Manhattan. As Lady Gaga collaborates with artists on her new Artpop project, and Marina Abramovic dances with Jay-Z, art has merged with mass entertainment in the US this summer.

We've covered that. What's more interesting is that all this is centred on New York, putting the art capital of the 20th century back where it belongs and leaving royal metropolises looking to their art laurels.

King of the hill. Top of the heap.

The new mix of high and low coming out of New York recalls the city's energy in the 1980s, when graffiti artists went clubbing with Andy Warhol, or the 1960s, when The Velvet Underground took pop art to eerie heights. And it proves yet again that the US is the land of modernity, with New York its cultural capital.

Why is this? It's basic history. The US was the first modern democracy, and after the civil war it experienced a colossal industrial takeoff. By 1900 it was building skyscrapers.

Early modernism in the arts was most advanced in Old Europe – Paris and Vienna, St Petersburg and Dublin – but it found a natural home in the US. Ever since Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal in New York in 1917, it has been among skyscrapers that modern art really fitted in.

To see a Mark Rothko painting at New York's Museum of Modern Art and then walk the streets outside is to experience a perfect match of art and life.

As Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Cornell saw, just to collect the trash on the sidewalk in New York is to find fabulous stories of the modern world. Migrants and millionaires, wonders and horrors dot the grid of Manhattan like the pulses of energy in Piet Mondrian's painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie.

I shun the petty nationalism that makes British galleries pretend Henry Moore is the equal of Jackson Pollock. The greatest art of the modern world belongs to New York. The art of this century is finding its way home.

ArtPop and rockNew YorkJonathan Jones
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Edinburgh art festival: the best of this year's public commissions

Burke and Hare beermats, 19th-century computer code and a scrap-heap organ brought back to life … ghosts have taken over this year's Edinburgh art festival

Ghosts haunt everywhere in Edinburgh – even the beermats. And the beer in a pub on the Royal Mile does taste great. But there's a reason I'm drinking 80 Shilling – I'm in pursuit of Ross Sinclair's project Real Life and How to Live it in Auld Reekie, part of the 10th Edinburgh art festival. When I finally nab one of the mats, it's filled with a top 10 list of people murdered to order by the infamous Edinburgh corpse-merchants Burke and Hare: "1. Old Donald £7.10s," it reads. "2. Abigail Simpson £10. 3. Joseph the Miller £10 … "

On the flipside of the beermat (which are also available as posters), Sinclair lists famous Edinburgh writers, including Robert Louis Stevenson, who immortalised Burke and Hare in his uncanny tale The Body-Snatcher. It might be known as the Athens of the North, but this city's creativity feeds on its darkness, Sinclair implies: no body-snatching, no romantic novels.

This year's EAF public commissions delve into the Scottish capital's ancient recesses, root themselves in gothic streets and neglected graveyards, and make you see surreal analogies between stone and flesh.

Sometimes they are a blast. Warmed by my beer, I descend into Chalmer's Close, one of the old alleyways that branch like dark veins off the tourist artery of the High Street, to find a medieval chapel built in the 16th century, demolished in the 19th when Waverley Station claimed the land on which it was built, then partially reconstructed on this side of town. In this gothic hideaway, artist and musician Sarah Kenchington has created a scrapyard sound machine. Pipes cannibalised from old organs have been lashed on to a frame and painted with colour codes to help visitors identify their notes. A helper releases a giant lever and air is pressed into a bag of plastic sacking, and then on into the heart of the machine. Soon the room is full of whistles and honks, as if there's a snoring Loch Ness monster in residence.

Kenchington's mechanism, perfectly tuned, creates a kind of musical utopia. In an ideal world, everyone might play together on some vast instrument that generates harmony without suppressing individuality – and here is that very thing. Anyone can work the levers or play the pipes. It takes at least two people; the more the messier. It's a festival in itself.

After this carnival of noise, Peter Liversidge's Flags for Edinburgh seem banal. On buildings throughout the city, flagpoles display white flags bearing the single word "HELLO". Yeah, hello. Hello again. Hello.

At the Ingleby Gallery, Liversidge has an exhibition to accompany this infra-thin artwork. He's made giant blow-ups of a series of prints by the 19th-century Austrian artist Max Klinger. Klinger's originals show a man who becomes obsessed with a woman's glove. By enlarging them, Liversidge brings out every bizarre detail. Klinger was working in Vienna right at the time Sigmund Freud was inventing psychoanalysis – and he would have made a good patient for the original sex doctor. In one picture, Klinger is seen asleep dreaming of his beloved glove; in another, he raises an altar to it. It's a clear case of fetishism. To ram the point home, Liversidge has placed a gigantic marble replica of that glove below each of his giant prints.

So the flags are silly, the gloves intriguingly perverse; but how do they connect? Hammering away on an old typewriter, Liversidge sends streams of proposals for projects to galleries, some entirely practical, some wilfully impossible (previous ideas include freezing over the Mersey and wrapping a halo of lights around Arthur's Seat). The flags and gloves just happen to be two notions that were green-lit. I think it's a bit contrived, this method, and finally a bit brittle. The results flutter for a moment in the mind, then fade.

What stays with you and what vanishes, though, cannot always be predicted. By their very nature, festivals tend to foreground the fly-by-night, the art that's fun and easily forgotten. But there is something far darker and harder to leave behind up Calton Hill. In the cemetery that lies on this teetering hillside, Christine Borland and Brody Condon have created a piece of work that refuses to go away. The tower here that houses their art was built in the early 19th century as a guardhouse against the body-snatchers prowling Edinburgh looking for freshly buried corpses. While Sinclair jokes about Burke and Hare, Borland and Condon stalk their very shadows.

Dark stone tombs crowd the graveyard. Inside the tower, gutted by fire in 2007 and now open to the blustering wind, there hang long, flapping chains of pink cards, pockmarked with holes. Two centuries ago cards like these programmed Jacquard looms in the Scottish weaving industry, making them some of the oldest programmable machines. Here the artists have imprinted the cards with an enigmatic narrative: the stories and secrets of two women who lived in the former Trades Maiden hospital. One hated living in the hospital; the other loved it – her stories are happy and nostalgic and take up most of the ones and zeros. These Daughters of Decayed Tradesmen, as the artists call them, who spent their childhoods in a now-defunct charity institution, tell their tales – but unless you read binary, you won't be able to understand them.

On the train home, reading The Body-Snatcher, I start to see what it stands for, this collection of trailing threads slung in an abandoned place. In the tale, two anatomists see something inexplicable and silent, the ghostly face of a man they dissected. The eerie chain of punchcards hanging in the graveyard floats there, real yet insubstantial, husbanding a history that cannot be read. In a city full of ghosts, Borland and Condon have made their own.

ArtEdinburgh festivalFestivalsEdinburgh festival 2013Jonathan Jones
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Why is the world's best art being detained at her majesty's pleasure?

Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings sit cloistered in the Royal Collection – it's time they were released to the nation

Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings are the most compelling works of art in Britain. Many are on show in this year's Edinburgh festival, in an exhibition at the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

When I say these drawings are the greatest works of art in the British isles, I really mean it. Leonardo was both an artist and a scientist. It's in his intellectual-yet-imaginative, inquisitive-yet-humane studies of the human body that his visual genius perfectly complements his passion for knowledge.

So the exhibition in the Queen's Gallery at Holyroodhouse is an encounter with a sublime brain. Sadly, it is also a spectacle of absurdity. These drawings and many more by Leonardo belong to the Queen and will be passed on to her successors, right down to baby George and beyond. Why, except as a gross display of inherited wealth, do they need them?

It is unjustifiable, even if you love the monarchy, for the Queen to own so much work by the greatest artist who ever lived. This excessive act of possession adds nothing to the prestige of royalty. Worse, it gets in the way of public appreciation of some of the world's supreme art.

I've tried, for years, to suppress my mystification at why the Queen hangs on to art that would obviously be better used by a public museum. I have met curators of the Royal Collection and admired their knowledge; I've also been lucky enough to study Leonardo's drawings in the Royal Library at Windsor. In many ways, the Royal Collection is well run. But that changes nothing. Windsor Castle is simply not the right place for our most precious art heritage to be held.

Royalty is a silk sheet that covers and veils art, swathing it in pointless luxury. The Queen runs two public art galleries, in London and Edinburgh, and they are both rum affairs with cloying decor and all the paraphernalia of monarchy. That's fine for tourists, but it does not make for serious art viewing. It breaks my heart if Leonardo, of all artists, is made to look irrelevant – but that is what exhibitions by the Royal Collection achieve.

When the National Gallery put on a Leonardo da Vinci exhibition in 2011, it was a stupendous success that drew serious and fascinated crowds. A few months after it closed, an exhibition of Leonardo's anatomical drawings opened at the Queen's Gallery in London – but the excitement did not follow Leonardo across Green Park. There's something about a gallery attached to Buckingham Palace (or Holyroodhouse) that predefines what happens there as fluffy royal heritage. It's not a cool date, is it, "let's go to the Queen's Gallery".

It obviously would have been better to include a show of these marvellous drawings at the National Gallery, as part of its Leonardo epic. Instead, the Royal Collection went into competion with the NG – and lost.

But the real losers are the people. We should be able to look at Leonardo's drawings in our public collections. They should be given to the nation.

• I will be talking about Leonardo and other geniuses at the Edinburgh international book festival, if you want to argue about this in person.

Leonardo da VinciArtNational GalleryExhibitionsMonarchyJonathan Jones
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Slavery in the basement and the Rio bikini threat – the week in art

Gregor Schneider unleashes his dark imagination, the Edinburgh art festival gets its own scrap-metal organ, and Rio 2016 makes a smelly choice of building site

Exhibition of the week

Gregor Schneider
This creator of formidable and genuinely scary installations has also become good at generating controversy. Edinburgh's Summerhall is not scared of his dark imagination, though, and boasts that his latest work is potentially provocative. It explores racism and slavery in a sinister space carved out of the building's basement. Oh, and there's nudity. Don't say you weren't warned. Summerhall, Edinburgh EH9 until 31 August

Other exhibitions this week

Nam June Paik
A celebration of this playful pioneer of video and electronic art whose joyous impulses animate and liberate technology. Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh EH8 from 9 August until 19 October

Fiona Banner
A mini-retrospective of Banner's powerful art of language. Summerhall, Edinburgh EH9 until 27 September

Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane
The social sculptor of our time brings his generous vision to Scotland together with longtime collaborator Kane. Jupiter Artland, Bonnington House, Steadings, near Edinburgh EH27 until 15 September

Ilana Halperin
A modern cabinet of curiosities unveils the beauty of geology. National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh EH1 until 29 September

Masterpiece of the week

Hugo van der Goes, The Trinity Altarpiece (c1478-1479)

This painting by one of the greatest masters of the Northern Renaissance is a real Scottish art treasure. It was commissioned for Trinity Chapel in Edinburgh from the same artist who painted the majestic Portinari Altarpiece. Amazing that such a painter sent a work so far north, and sad what happened later: in 1848, the chapel was demolished to make way for Waverley Station. So now this painting is in the city's National Gallery, where its intimate connection with Edinburgh is less apparent than if the chapel survived. And yet … this year's Edinburgh art festival sees Trinity Apse, rebuilt from the chapel's stones, reopened by artist Sarah Kenchington. She has created an organ out of scrap, as if to lure the organist angel in this painting back to the forgotten chapel. theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Artist sends new moon into orbit for a year – via FedEx

Katie Paterson is boldly going where art hasn't been before. But is her idea too earthbound?

Artist Katie Paterson is to put a new moon into orbit. Excited? You might not be when you read the details.

Paterson plans to send a fragment of moon rock, borrowed from the Great North Museum in Newcastle, around the world by delivery service. So it will "orbit" the earth for a year. Sort of. Presumably, the highest it will get is in a jet plane.

For a moment there, I thought contemporary art was getting to grips with the revolutionary science of our time. Paterson has been acclaimed as an artist who deals with space and the sublime scale of the cosmos, but this work seems to me imaginatively as well as literally earthbound. The idea speaks the language of the art gallery and art magazines – and says more about the limitations of that language than about the wide open spaces of astronomy.

In the same week the shortlist for Astronomy Photographer of the Year was unveiled, it's time to ask why the nature of art has become such that it defines real images of the stars and solar system as less interesting than such brittle, absurd meditations about space.

It wouldn't be hard to send a work of art into proper orbit: there are enough missions, enough interested scientists, surely. So why so introspective? It's as if art has become too small in its concerns to take on the big stuff. When it does, it seems in this case to obsess about the process of the artist imagining science, rather than engaging with actual scientific enquiry.

It will be possible to track Paterson's "satellite" on an iPad, but I would rather look at images of the real moon – or, for that matter, go outside at night and contemplate it.

Art about space is a very exciting field – but not if it just ends up being art about art.

ArtThe moonAstronomyJonathan Jones
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