Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 4

Cyborgs, snapchat dysmorphia and AI-led surgery: has our digital age ruined beauty?

From photo-editing apps to ‘Instagram face’, technology has radically altered the way we see ourselves. Ahead of a new exhibition at Somerset House, our critic considers the meaning of art in a digital age

It’s the artist Qualeasha Wood who tells me about Snapchat dysmorphia, “a term coined by plastic surgeons who noticed there was a shift in the mid 2010s when people started bringing in their AI-beautified portraits instead of a celebrity picture”. To resolve your Snapchat dysmorphia, you get your real face remodelled to look like the ideal version of you that artificial intelligence has perfected on your phone screen.

There is a fundamental problem with this, says Adam Lowe, whose Factum Foundation in Madrid is at the forefront of art and technology, digitally documenting artworks and cultural heritage sites around the world. When you have surgery to look like your best self as shown on a flat screen, the results in three-dimensional reality can be very odd indeed. You can feel Lowe’s sadness at the way plastic surgery botches human restoration in pursuit of screen perfection: “I have to look away,” he says.

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‘History’s most devastating document of war’: the simple yet graphic details of the Bayeux tapestry

Hand-stitched depiction of Battle of Hastings pulls viewers into story of friendship and betrayal, vengeance and despair

“Angli et Franci” – these Latin words embroidered on the Bayeux tapestry may be the first time those cartoon rivals, the English and the French, were named together. But in one of the shifts from triumph to horror that make this epic work of art still gripping almost a millennium after it was made, the full sentence reads: “Here at the same time the English and French [or Angles and Franks] fell in battle”. Below the black lettering, horses and chainmailed riders are thrown about and upside down in a bloody tangle. In the lower margin lie corpses and a severed head.

Now, in an unprecedented piece of cultural diplomacy between the Angli and Franci, this 70-metre long Romanesque wonder, preserved for centuries in Bayeux, Normandy, is to go on show at the British Museum. In exchange, Sutton Hoo treasures and the Lewis chessmen will go to France. When it opens in September 2026 this will surely be one of the British Museum’s most popular shows ever – for every British schoolchild learns this is not just a work of art, but a document of our history and who we are.

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Lubaina Himid has a chance encounter and Ai Weiwei takes to the streets – the week in art

The Turner prize-winner collaborates with Magda Stawarska, Weiwei unveils a public sculpture and Hockney and Emin celebrate the power of drawing – all in your weekly dispatch

Lubaina Himid With Magda Stawarska: Another Chance Encounter
An installation exploring the letters of early 20th-century modernist Sophie Brzeska, plus new paintings by Himid.
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, from 12 July to 2 November

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Ed Sheeran’s Pollock homage has energy but no feeling or truth

Abstract art like this gives all abstract art a bad name, just meaningless concoctions that avoid proper scrutiny

One thing is obvious about Ed Sheeran the painter: he doesn’t want to ruin his clothes. He paints in a white protective suit, photos reveal, as if paint was radioactive material or sewage. It’s a telling contrast with a real artist like Jenny Saville, who gets completely covered with paint like a naughty three-year-old, let alone Van Gogh, who ate the stuff.

Sheeran isn’t claiming to be one of those artists – is he? He’s in it for fun and charity. And his paintings have more energy than you’d think from the prissy hazmat suit. He must have moved about a bit, flicking and pouring the fizzy greenish blues, hot orange, lime, mixing them as if making cocktails.

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Aussie dots, Tudor pots and nudist shots – the week in art

Modern abstract painting from the Dreamtime, a ceramic deep dive into a Tudor power struggle and a celebration of body art – all in your weekly dispatch

Emily Kam Kngwarray
A survey of this revered Australian painter who combined modern abstraction with maps of the Dreamtime.

• Tate Modern, London, 10 July until 11 January

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Thin Black Line legends return, William Kentridge dazzles and Van Gogh meets a modern – the week in art

Lubaina Himid reincarnates a pioneering show, the South African artist re-energises sculpture and Vincent goes head to head with Anselm Kiefer – all in your weekly dispatch

Connecting Thin Black Lines: 1985-2025

Claudette Johnson, Sonia Boyce and Ingrid Pollard are among the artists in this show that revisits their 1985 exhibition, The Thin Black Line - curated, like the original, by Lubaina Himid.

• ICA, London, until 7 September

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Lessons for Young Artists by David Gentleman review – secrets from the studio

The much-loved painter, designer of stamps and creator of anti-war posters shares tips from a 90-year career

You know the art of David Gentleman even if you don’t know you know it. Anyone who’s passed through London’s Charing Cross tube station has seen his life-filled black-and-white mural of medieval people, enlarged from his woodcuts, digging, hammering, chiselling to construct the Eleanor Cross that once stood nearby. His graphic art has graced everything from stamps to book covers to Stop the War posters in a career spanning seven decades. He says he’s been making art for 90 years, since he was five.

His parents were also artists, and in his latest book he reproduces a Shell poster by his father to show he follows in a modern British tradition of well-drawn, well-observed popular art. Perhaps it is because he learned from his parents as naturally as learning to speak – “Seeing them drawing tempted me to draw” – that Gentleman dislikes pedagogy. He’s proud that he never had to teach for a living, always selling his art. So his guide to the creative life, Lessons for Young Artists, is anything but a how-to manual or didactic textbook.

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William Kentridge review – this endless flow of creativity lays claim to Picasso’s legacy

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield
From a goat sculpture to a giant bronze ampersand, via a filmed argument about sardines between two Kentridges, there is no rest for this dazzling artist’s imagination

How’s this for vanity art: William Kentridge sits astride a horse, like a Roman emperor, his profile beakily aloft as he controls his steed. Except this statue is not as solid as it sounds but a photographic mural of Kentridge in horse-riding pose behind a skeletal wooden horse constructed from parts of artist’s easels with a saddle slung over its cardboard tube of a body. Kentridge mocks himself, and mocks the pretensions of sculpture. Or does he? There’s a confident, showoff brilliance to this illusion and the parallel with a previous great artist is obvious.

Another sculpture, a more solid one, Goat, is a swirling tangle of lines solidified in space, capped with a goat’s head. It’s a homage to Picasso’s 1950 sculpture The She Goat. When you see Picasso’s art it’s not so much one specific work that awes you as the boundless flow of creativity that moves from one style to another in an inexhaustible, playful stream. Kentridge lays claim to that legacy here – and with justification. He is just about the only artist now who can dizzy you in a comparable way with the abundance of his creativity as his impulses dance from drawing to film to collage and back to drawing.

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‘I’ve been told off for taking snaps too’: our critic on the selfie-taking crackdown at the Uffizi gallery

As another piece of art falls victim to social media, Florence’s Uffizi gallery is placing restrictions on visitors’ behaviour. Is this a sensible safeguard – or simple snobbery?

It’s that time of year again. As the crowds grow, historic Italian cities and museums become the setting for a You’ve Been Framed-style sequence of absurdist moments. Last year it was a young woman embracing a (replica) Giambologna statue in the streets of Florence. This year the Uffizi gallery, guardian of Florentine art, has been defiled as a man posed for a photo in front of a portrait of Ferdinando de’ Medici. While imitating the hand-on-hip, baton-wielding pose of this scion of the soon-to-be-extinct Medici family, he slipped and put his hand through the canvas. This comes shortly after an incident in a Verona museum, where a tourist sat on an artwork in the form of a crystal chair, also for a photo, and shattered it.

The Uffizi’s director says it will now take action against the swarm of visitors “coming to museums to make memes or take selfies for social media … We will set very precise limits, preventing behaviour that is not compatible with the sense of our institutions and respect for cultural heritage.” But is it really fair to see everyone who takes a selfie with a painting, or shares their travels on social media, as part of a barbarian horde intent on destroying civilisation? If so, the battle is lost.

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Kiefer/Van Gogh review – Anselm puts the nightmare into Vincent’s sunflower visions

Royal Academy, London
The Dutch artist looks like a prophet of the Holocaust when viewed through the 80-year-old German painter’s dark lens in this startling show, which makes you see how Van Gogh might have painted modern horrors

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853, in the middle of the comparatively peaceful 19th century. If he hadn’t shot himself in a cornfield at the age of 37, and had made it to his 60s, he could have witnessed all that end in the 1914-18 war. If he’d lived to 80, he would have read in his newspaper, at an Arles cafe table, of Adolf Hitler becoming German chancellor, and in 1945, at 92, watched newsreel footage of the emaciated survivors of Belsen.

Odd thoughts, but they are stoked by the Royal Academy’s strange and startling exhibition. This is an intimate encounter between the great living German history painter, to mark his 80th year, and his hero Van Gogh. It juxtaposes his responses to the latter, from teenage drawings to recent gold-spattered wheatfield scenes, with the Dutch artist’s works. The peculiar result is to make you see how the dreamer of sunflowers and starry nights might have painted the horrors of modern history, if he’d lived to see them.

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