Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 55

Succeeding Succession: books, games, music and more about the ultra rich

As Succession returns to our screens, Guardian critics offer artists’ varied takes on the seductive and corruptive nature of excessive riches

Hell hath no fury like a pop icon scorned, and nobody does indignant financial rage better than Rihanna on the impeccable Bitch Better Have My Money. Hummed under the breath of many a freelancer drafting their 14th polite chase for payment, its playful trap beat enlaces a tale of dodgy accountant exploitation with a shot of chest-puffing braggadocio: “Don’t act like you forgot, I call the shots.” Whether you are negotiating a pay rise or cajoling yourself into another day’s hard grind, it’s all the encouragement you need to stalk into that office and demand what is yours. Jenessa Williams

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Frieze, phones and avant garde fashion – the week in art

The Frieze art fair is in full swing in Regent’s Park, Martin Boyce is on the blower in Glasgow and Lucy McKenzie is playing tricks on the eye in Liverpool – all in your weekly dispatch

Lucy McKenzie
A retrospective of the Glasgow-born artist’s architectural paintings and forays into avant garde fashion.
• Tate Liverpool, from 20 October to 13 March

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The Spanish Gallery review – would you like a scary fresco with your sherry and tapas?

Bishop Auckland, County Durham
This new museum has big dreams – but that old Spanish magic doesn’t hit you until you reach the frescoes. Great place for a tapas bar, though

Great Spanish geniuses of the Renaissance and baroque era are celebrated by Bishop Auckland’s newest museum but it makes no mention of the most influential of all, Miguel de Cervantes. Perhaps because Cervantes’ Don Quixote tilting at windmills would strike too close to home. For this gallery, in a converted Victorian bank in a small British town, is tragicomically quixotic.

It wants to be the Prado of the north. There seems to be plenty of good will towards that dream from institutions such as the National Gallery and the New York Hispanic Society, who have loaned works. And who wouldn’t wish it well, a gallery standing up for the high culture of a fellow European nation in this age of shallow populism? But what promises to be brave, rigorous and idealistic often looks like a vanity project. The Spanish Gallery is the brainchild of collector and philanthropist Jonathan Ruffer, part of what he calls the Auckland Project, a one-man regeneration scheme in the centre of this beautifully set but economically embattled place that includes Auckland Castle, a gallery of miners’ art, and – coming soon – a museum of faith. Yet the generosity of Ruffer’s patronage goes with a determination to impose his views that makes it very hard to find your own pace and emotional connection with The Spanish Gallery.

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From concealed penises to Barbra Streisand: how Frieze got its mojo back – review

Regent’s Park, London
After decades of fun, noise, fame and money, the London art fair has found its soul. But there’s still plenty of outrage and sleaze at the grown-up Frieze

I was relieved when I finally found the hidden willies. At times, the first post-pandemic Frieze art fair is so relaxing you could fall asleep in one of its classy lounges. So it was good to see Lindsey Mendick flying the flag for subtle outrage. At the Carl Freedman Gallery booth I come across her lustrous, decadent ceramic vases, whose wounded sides spurt octopus arms. Mendick should be on next year’s Turner shortlist if the Tate has any desire to save its dying prize. Then Freedman showed me another detail. From one of the pots protrude penises like shiny wet worms. It turns out there’s sleaze at the new, grownup Frieze after all – you just need a longer attention span to find it.

The art world has looked into itself during the pandemic. And it’s found that art has to be be more than just fun and noise and fame and money … it has to be sustaining. But how does a cultural sphere that has spent decades celebrating shallowness suddenly find its inner light? At first sight, Frieze has simply gone numb with shock.

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Getting over a breakup? Critics pick music, books, games and more to help

Heartbreak is the ailment, could culture be the cure? Our critics’ suggestions to help ease your pain – or channel your angst

The best method for getting through a breakup is watching Marc Webb’s movie (500) Days of Summer, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets dumped by the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl Zooey Deschanel. For all its faults, this film has a killer rejection scene; it’s so painful, especially for a man, that it should lance the boil of emotional pain all by itself. Gordon-Levitt stars as Tom, who shows up for a party to which he has been diplomatically invited by his now ex-girlfriend Summer. The poor dope is somehow hoping against hope that the old magic will be rekindled. The party is cleverly split on the screen between “Expectations” and “Reality”: on the left we see his fantasy that they will start canoodling, on the right, the horrible reality of her distant, if polite interactions with him. Pure agony. Peter Bradshaw

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Into paradise with Sebastião Salgado and fresh sensations at the Tate – the week in art

The Brazilian genius tours the rainforest, Anicki Yi fires up the Turbine Hall and cubism heads for the gutter – all in your weekly dispatch

Salgado: Amazônia
The great photographer Sebastião Salgado unveils his most moving project yet – a rich and startling journey into the rainforest he calls “a paradise on Earth”.
• Science Museum, London, 13 October to March 2022.

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Shilpa Gupta review – rousing reminder that free speech used to be a noble cause

Barbican Curve, London
With the words of dissidents pinned to walls, this thrilling new show lays bare the censoriousness of modern culture

When the Chinese dissident Liu Xia was under house arrest with state security guards posted at her front door, she wrote a passionate poem to her husband, Liu Xiaobo: “I’ll never give up the struggle for freedom from the oppressors’ jail, but I’ll be your willing prisoner for life.”

Shilpa Gupta has typed up these translated words on what looks to have been an old-fashioned typewriter. They are pinned to the wall beside her line drawing of the late Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel prize for his outspoken defence of human rights, was repeatedly imprisoned for challenging China’s authoritarian state, and died in custody in 2017. The following year the Chinese state allowed Liu Xia to leave for medical treatment in Germany, presumably to avoid a second outcry. Liu Xia’s moving poem of protest and love pulls you up. What a story! Where are all the plays and films about this extraordinary couple who told truth to power and spoke their love to one another?

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Hervé Télémaque review – ‘His work is just waiting for some pretentious fool to decode it’

Serpentine Gallery, London
From military operations to the death of André Breton, the Parisian artist loved to paint seismic events. But it’s odd and themeless, proving nothing dates more badly than pop art

You can’t accuse the Serpentine of relentlessly reciting liberal orthodoxies. One of the biggest paintings in its retrospective of work by Hervé Télémaque celebrates conservative Jacques Chirac’s landslide victory in the 2002 French presidential election. It’s a carnival of democracy with caricatures of Chirac from Le Monde. At the bottom of the jovial canvas, however, are figures appropriated from a painting about lynchings by the great African-American artist Jacob Lawrence. And there’s the sombre undertow. Chirac’s rival for the Élysée Palace was National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. That’s what made the victory so sweet, even if you were not a conservative, but also threaded with anxiety.

I was neither cheered nor worried by this sadly irrelevant work of art. It does not make recent history come alive. That’s the trouble with painting. A canvas from centuries ago can be devastatingly immediate, while one done the other day can be a dusty relic. I’m not sure if the 2002 election is remembered all that much even in France. And this is a fairly recent event by the standards of Télémaque’s art. US military activities in the 1960s and the death of André Breton are among the stories this Parisian pop artist tells. Nothing dates more badly than pop art. Most of its practitioners are museum artists now, lost in time. Who wants yesterday’s papers?

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‘Some of art’s most luxurious orgies’ – Poussin and the Dance review

National Gallery, London
So sombre Poussin was actually a hedonist? What a surprise! By dwelling on his decade in Rome, then a city revelling in raw sensuality, this show casts him as Caravaggio’s lewder cousin

Nicolas Poussin intimidates me. This 17th-century French artist, who spent most of his life in Rome, is so profoundly serious it can feel like you’ll never be quite grownup enough to get him. Quail before his solemn depictions of the Seven Sacraments. Melt under the severe gaze of his Self-Portrait in the Louvre. His greatest champion in Britain was the art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, who presumably found something delicious in possessing a secret knowledge of the Poussin code, the one I’ve never been privy to. It was also possessed by the snobbish writer Anthony Powell, whose novel sequence shares its title with Poussin’s painting A Dance to the Music of Time.

Now the mystery is blown wide open. The National Gallery has cracked art’s most elitist code. Its liberating new exhibition unleashes a Poussin who is human, passionate and high on ancient history. This it achieves with a razor-sharp focus on his first 10 years living in Rome and feasting on its pleasures.

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Rothko on paper, Rossetti in love and Télémaque on the rampage – the week in art

Shilpa Gupta celebrates imprisoned writers, Rankin has fun with baldpieces, Rothko reaches for the sublime and the Turner prize goes in for group love – all in your weekly dispatch

Hervé Télémaque
This radical Parisian pop artist mixes Tintin and Roy Lichtenstein to tell global stories of modern life.
• Serpentine, London, from 7 October to 30 January.

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